


La Bête du Argent

by Whreflections



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Adoption, Angst with a Happy Ending, Animal Death, Child Abuse, Chris is not Allison's Biological Father, Full Shift Werewolves, Good Peter, M/M, Minor Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Spark Stiles Stilinski, Suicide Attempt, Torture, Victoria is an Argent but Not By Marriage, no infidelity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-01-20 19:04:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18531241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whreflections/pseuds/Whreflections
Summary: When Chris is a boy, it becomes very clear that the prominent soulmate tattoo on his arm depicts an alpha werewolf.  If he'd come from a pack, or even a family with no knowledge of the supernatural, it wouldn't have mattered, not really, but that wasn't his fate.  He's an Argent, and a werewolf's mate, and those contradictions have no place in the same body, not in his father's opinion.There's a reason, though, that soulmates are marked.  They aren't suggestions; they aren't possibilities.  They're exactly what you need.  When Chris meets Peter Hale after nearly three decades of looking for him, he knows right then that whatever hell he's been through, and whatever hell is still before him, it's all worth it to have something his father would never believe possible- a wild and beautiful thing that belongs to him, heart and soul.





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> So I had no plans to write this- but it makes me smile typing that because honestly, that's how a lot of my best work has come about. I had no plans for it, but it appeared in my head, and had plans for me, lmao
> 
> This story covers a lot of time but only in snatches, so it isn't so much in itself a long story...but it is a bit grueling in that it hurts a lot at the beginning, and in parts of the middle. I'm sorry about that...but I promise the end is happy, and parts of the middle, too. 
> 
> The 'attempted suicide' tag is for this chapter, and if you need to know more information I'm putting detailed info in the end note so you can check ahead if you need to. Stay safe and do what's best for your brain pls; I love you all.

I am exact and merciless, but I love you—There is no escape for you.

-To One Shortly To Die, Walt Whitman

 

_i. fading in; Homestead, Florida_

When Chris was a boy, just 6 or 7, the tattoo slowly fading in on the inside of his arm didn’t look much like anything.  It was longer than his parents’, and his sister’s, and most he’d ever seen, but there wasn’t much else about it, then, to set it apart. 

He drew on it sometimes, using markers to give clumsy form to an outline that was at this point in his life a mere suggestion of it.  Red-brown, and a smudge of silver, and just there in one spot, a pop of brilliant red.  Carmine red, his mother said, but his father called it blood, and it reminded Chris of strawberries. 

Sometimes, in his drawings, that’s what it was—others it was an apple, a distant stop sign, the tip of a hat.  The larger, vague mass of brown was a tree most often, though there was one day he made it into a continent, his future tattoo a map, perhaps, of the distant place he’d meet his soulmate for the first time, or a world that only existed in a book they’d read together. 

He was 9 when it started to take shape properly, 11 when there was no doubt. 

They were in Florida then, living for the year in a town called Homestead outside Miami.  They had air conditioners in the windows of the old house they were renting, fans in every room, and even over the incessant whir he’d heard his father arguing with his mother down the hall, his voice sharp and rising. 

“I won’t have it; I’ll burn it off of him first.  He’s an Argent; he won’t be tied to some filthy beast, I swear to God—“

He went on, and on, and Chris crept out onto the porch, down the drive to the end of the street where he could sit in the heavy night air and listen only to the wild sounds of the brush and the nervous beating of his own heart.  Everything was wilder, somehow, in Florida—the gators roared like lions, and no one had ever told him to expect that.  The bugs were louder still, and every now and then the call of something strange would cut through it all, high and keening, a chilling and thrilling unknown. 

When the streetlight at the end of their driveway cycled on, Chris looked down at his tattoo, and searched the mark that would bind him to his soulmate for some trace of what his father saw. 

It was a wolf of enormous size, sure, but the first word out of his mouth to describe the creature would never have been _beast_.  They were in full flight, legs stretched out before them and behind, their tail streaming behind them, ears back as everything in them pressed down and dug deep for speed. 

The band of silver that swirled around their neck was flowing, stylized—it was clear, now, that even complete this soulmate mark wouldn’t be a design of strict realism.  There was too much fluidity in the lines, the silver weaving too far down the wolf’s chest and through their fur to look like a true collar, though the resemblance and positioning couldn’t be denied.  Their muzzle tipped up, scenting into the wind, searching—and just above, watching ahead, their eyes burned a brilliant and unmistakable red. 

His training as an Argent had only recently picked up in earnest, but Chris didn’t have to have his father’s knowledge to know just what exactly he had emblazoned across the inside of his left arm, far too large to hide even if he’d ever wanted to. 

The circle might have been symbolic, but the wolf wasn’t.  They were no metaphor; no abstract idea. 

An alpha werewolf was bound to him forever, predetermined by fate or God or science, depending on what you chose to believe.  A creature of legend that his family had hunted for generations, back to the first alpha they’d taken down in Gévaudan.  All those years ago, one man had become the reason the world believed silver was a werewolf’s bane.

Chris was a boy; it was easy for boys to dream.  By an accident of chromosomes at birth he’d been given a form that let him readily imagine he could be or do almost anything, because somewhere or when in the world dozens like him had already done it.  This was true of most things, but he was an Argent, too, and old enough to know that he was only ever intended to be a single thing—a flesh and blood weapon, a foot solider in a feud that arguably should have ended with the generation who started it. 

Chris’ fingers traced the tattoo under the lamplight, fingertips curling under his wolf’s chin, around their chest, down the flowing lines of their legs, and he dreamed, even though he shouldn’t.  It had all started with one man; maybe it would end with him.  Maybe he had this mark for a reason; maybe his wolf would find him before his father’s rage could do too much damage to their future before it ever started. 

Whoever the wolf was, they had from birth been his.  There in the middle of the night, his love caught like a bubble in his throat, and he wondered if he would ever be brave enough to tell his father it was already there; it always had been. 

His soulmate was a wolf, an alpha, and already, unknown and mysterious, he loved them.   

 

 

_ii. madness; Kearney, Missouri_

Beau was born in a barn, and died in one, and there was symmetry in that.  Chris had been taught for years by then to look for patterns.  It was strange, maybe, to say that it was a comfort to find them, but the search for them was normal, and stable, and for a life unstable to its very foundations a little framework could be a comfort in itself. 

At 13 he was still a boy, though his father had said over and over it was past time he became a man.  He could hold a gun like one; he could kill like one, but he had soft edges still, in those days.  On his knees in the hay, his own nails digging so hard into his palms blood welled around them, any comfort was comfort, however scarce.  Anything at all. 

The hay around Beau’s mouth was wet with saliva and blood, sticking to his tongue.  His eyes were open; when he could move, Chris would close them, but his fingers couldn’t uncurl at first, and his chest was heaving.  The sobs that shook him had carried past the point of tears though his eyes still itched; his face was still wet.  It was awhile before he could do anything about his own eyes, too, and shutting them certainly didn’t change a damn thing. 

He would see this behind his eyes for years—the hay and the blood and the coonhound who’d for three years been his best and only friend sprawled dead from a bullet from his own gun, because Chris couldn’t bear to watch him suffer. 

The cage in the corner where his father had penned Beau in three weeks before with a rabid raccoon; the hole Chris had kicked in the barn door in his blind and impotent rage.  His own voice played back, screaming that he’d promised, he’d _promised_ that the dogs had had all their shots, that they were safe. 

His father’s voice, softer, nearly drowned by the raccoon’s screams as Beau finished the fight. 

“The truth isn’t always more important.  If you have to do what’s right, you can’t always be honest, and I had to teach you.  You need to see what it’s like—because he loves you now, but in a week or two, he won’t.  And it won’t be his fault.”

He had the dream for years, and years, until it wasn’t always Beau’s body in the hay—because he had known all along what the lesson really was, even in the moment when killing his dog had broken his heart. 

After that, there wasn’t a day for the next 16 years Chris didn’t cover his tattoo around his father.  Not a single one.  It wasn’t protection; it couldn’t even really be called a smokescreen.  They both knew what was underneath, but it wasn’t his father’s to look at anymore, and that was something.    

 

 

 _iii._ _execution; Visalia, California_

The vineyard execution was not the first time Chris’ father hit him, and it wasn’t the first time he’d wanted to hit back.  It wasn’t the first time he followed through, either, because he wasn’t yet able, but it was the first time that he knew beyond all doubt that someday, he would. 

Someday, he would be braver, or less frightened, or less honorable, or a worse son.  Which of these things were true, or whether all were, he didn’t know, but he knew that it would happen, as surely as he knew that he would always hate California. 

He was 14, almost 15, growing into himself a bit, but still long limbed and awkward.  He didn’t have his father’s muscle, or his little sister’s discipline, but his gun fit into his palm like it’d been sculpted to fit, and his aim was true almost every time.  He took pride in that, even at the times when he couldn’t take pride in their work.  Sometimes, it was easier to break things down to their components. 

She was little still, and already their father had begun to teach Kate what he’d never managed to beat into Chris—that it was alright to wound and not to kill, to poison, and to wait.  To act first, and be sure later.  To quote the code over whiskey to other hunters, and bend it when the truth was deemed less important. 

A better man would have been able to say, then, that they hated him.  A better man would have, years ago, stopped hugging him back. 

The wolf had hung from a scarecrow’s post, her arms wrapped with barbed wire they’d dipped in wolfsbane.  The California winter rain was pelting down cold and heavy, big drops, the cloud cover too solid to see the moon.  In the spotlight, her eyes flashed blue, her fangs snapping.  Even her jaws looked tired. 

So much hinged on the color of the eyes. 

“You know how much I love that your kind can’t hide your guilt?  The minute you act on it, your very nature gives you away.” 

His father wrapped the hilt of the sword, so his hands wouldn’t slip in the rain.  To the left, the other man they’d met up with looked every bit as uneasy as Chris felt.  A hunter from the north, he’d gone along with this, he said, only to repay a debt.  What debt he’d had that was strong enough to bloody his conscience for, Chris never knew. 

Whatever it was, it was enough to glue his tongue to the roof of his mouth, and Chris instead spoke for both of them.  “This is bullshit.  We know she didn’t kill them; the autopsy proved it.  It was the kanima; she’s guilty because she didn’t stop it.  She let you catch her, and she’s going to let you—“

The hilt cracked into his cheekbone, hard, and his chin hit a trellis, and then the mud.  He bit through his own lip; the taste of blood and water and dirt in his mouth would for the rest of his life take him back to there, to looking up, dizzy, and seeing his father raise the sword, and a grown man who could have stopped him looking away, and a woman who’d already lost her mate and child closing her eyes, waiting for death like it could only bring her peace. 

Later that night, cleaning himself up in a filthy gas station bathroom, the man whose name he couldn’t remember had watched him at the sink.  Rather than stare at his tattoo like so many did, he’d gone out of his way to keep his eyes averted, like he felt something close to shame. 

“It was mercy, really, what your dad did.  They don’t last long, once their mate dies; it’s not in their nature.  Wolves mate for life.  Letting her live without him wouldn’t have been kindness.”

After an awkward moment where Chris had said nothing, done nothing but turned the water off and stared into the stained sink, he’d left.  The door closed, and Chris was alone with the spiders in the corners and the gurgling drain in the floor, and the heaviness of his own thoughts. 

The wolf on his arm had grown more detailed, by then.  Still stylized, but there was variation to the color that had only been hinted at before, rich auburn and mahogany and little wisps of black and grey, like smoke was caught in their coat.  In the sunlight, they would be a breathtaking beauty, there was no doubt in his mind.  A wolf like he’d never seen. 

Chris covered the wolf’s eyes with his palm, and leaned against the sink until he could breathe. 

 

 

_iv. first; Tulsa, Oklahoma_

The first time Chris saw a red wolf, he was 17.  It was early morning; the dew from the tall grass had wet his arms and his jeans and he was thinking already of the cup of coffee he’d need before school if he had any hope of keeping his eyes open through calculus.  He’d been on the trail all night of the most recent 10 year old boy who’d disappeared after last being seen following a dog on his bike.  With his tired eyes tracking the bends in the grass and the tire marks and the foot prints of a monster that hadn’t looked like one to children’s eyes, he felt oddly old. 

In the eyes of the law he wasn’t yet legally a man, but he couldn’t remember ever feeling as young as this boy had been.  Somehow, that would make finding his corpse even worse.  Chris might not have ever been a kid, not for long, not really, but it happened to other people, and his world shouldn’t touch them.  If he had his way, most of the world would have nothing in common with him at all; their entire lives caught up in a golden oblivious haze. 

The sun had risen just enough that he’d started to squint when he looked toward the horizon, and it was there that he first saw the wolf, his muscled shoulders just emerging from the tree line.  He was too big to be anything but what Chris knew him to be from just that first glance.  Real wolves were smart, and they were big, sometimes, but they were skittish and lanky and there was something different in the air around them.  They belonged to the land.

A werewolf walked like the land belong to him, and in many places, he wasn’t wrong.  There were pack territories that had stood for hundreds of years—this was something his father had taught him only reluctantly, only quickly.  He’d heard more about heritage and history from other hunters than he’d ever learned at home. 

Chris’ heart pounded in his chest so hard he knew it had to be heard, and he’d opened his mouth with the intent of saying something, only to falter over the words.  What would he have said?

_Is it you?_

_What’s your soulmate mark; is it you, running, with a line of silver on your neck?_

_Do I smell familiar?  Do you feel like you know me?_

His mouth closed, and his fingers went to his sleeve, ready to yank it up and show it off and hope that across the field, the wolf that might have been his would see. 

Before he could, the wolf had already sniffed the air, and stepped back.  Chris smelled like gunpowder and wolfsbane and coffee, and under that, himself.  For that wolf, on that day, none of it had meant anything. 

Chris skipped school, and the look his father gave him for it that evening couldn’t make a dent in the unexpected pain he’d felt seeing a creature he didn’t know turn their back to him and walk away. 

For half a minute, for the first time in years he’d let himself believe his life was about to change. 

He never expected that before the end of the hunt he would meet the wolf as a man, that they would talk about the mark on his arm in a way that Chris never had with anyone else.  He never would have thought that even though he was all wrong for Chris, he would still be his first. 

Gene Frances was a beta, the fourth son of the alpha, living out a peaceful life on land his ancestors had held since Oklahoma was a territory.  He was 37.  He had a steady hand and quick eye at pool, and he was willing to talk to hunters if it meant the rest of his family didn’t have to.  He was willing to take the risk. 

Outside of a truck stop near the edge of the city, he’d shared a cigarette with Chris while they waited out the creature they’d both come to hunt, and Gene had nodded toward the wolf on Chris’ arm.  Without his father there he’d rolled up his sleeves to bear the summer heat, and it felt a daring relief to be so exposed. 

“You thought it was me, didn’t you?” 

There was no malice in him, nothing but curiosity, but Chris blushed hard all the same. 

“There’s nothing wrong with it; of course you would, if you haven’t met them yet.”

Chris breathed in, and out, and watched the smoke curl toward the distant highway with the wind.  “I haven’t met them yet.”

“I haven’t met mine yet, either.”  Gene turned his head, and pulled down his collar, and let Chris see the tiny tattoo near the top of his spine of a swirling pink ribbon in the mouth of a blue sparrow, caught in an unseen breeze. 

Maybe it was the color of his coat, or that he’d exposed himself in return to Chris’ vulnerability.  Maybe it was that he was 17, and itching for a life he could hardly imagine.  Maybe it was the recent passing of the spring, or the nature of the creature they hunted, the thrill of putting something down that was beyond all doubt or debate purely evil at its core. 

They had met for the first time with a field between them, and they met for the last at a motel well past it, past the truck stop and off the highway, with a parking lot it shared with a Waffle House. 

Chris tried once to explain himself, but Gene stopped him, and there was only kindness in his eyes, not pity. 

“You want to know what it’s like.  I get it.  God knows with what you come from, most of our kind won’t give you the time of day.” 

His first time was not terrible.  There was pain, sure, but not on a level that mattered, not enough to sour it, not more than there should have been.  Most older men would have been large, and he’d chosen a wolf—he was imposing in more than his teeth, more than his strength. 

It felt good—the physicality of it, the exertion.  There was something to be said for even the taste and feel of sweat worked up for a good cause, and there was more still to love in the heady pleasure of losing himself in someone else, in interaction that didn’t carry a front.  In school he played at being a normal boy; with his family he played at being a good solider. 

There, in a cheap bed on old sheets with a wolf who loved this land more than Chris had ever had a chance to love anything, he was exactly himself—a lonely hunter who hated himself more often than he hated his prey. 

It was primal, but less rough than he’d expected, as full of grasping hands and eager scenting as it was snapping hips and the occasional graze of fang.  There was no distance after, either, with Gene’s tongue lapping him clean until he came a second time with a startled cry, Gene’s cheek nuzzling into the inside of his thigh, Gene’s hands pressing down on his hips. 

When they smoked together again, Gene had rubbed his palm up and down Chris’ chest, slow and steady, like he was memorizing. 

“They’ll touch you like this all the time, more if they’re going to be away from you, even for a little while.  You need to let them.  You’ll always smell like mate to them, but you need to smell like them to other wolves.  It’s important.”

Chris closed his eyes, and nodded, and tried to relax into it.  It was wholly his imagination, it had to be, but the inside of his left arm burned with a heat that seemed to come from within, radiating like a sunburn.  He ignored it, and tried to listen. 

“They’ll want to bite you, a mating bite, right here—“ his palm pressed against the side of Chris’ neck, warm and big.  “—it’ll hurt, but they’ll love it.”

“They’ll be rougher, at the full moon.  They’ll need you more.”

“You’ll be their anchor, if they need one.  Don’t ever forget that.”

The last lesson given was one Chris asked for, pausing to wait for the answer with his hand on the doorknob, his eyes already on the sliver of parking lot he could see through the door he’d cracked. 

“Is it true that they—if your soulmate dies, you don’t survive it?”

“We can, like anyone else.  The difference is, most of us don’t want to.”

He left Gene lying on his side, studying him, and he didn’t look back.  He snuck in through his own window, and showered until the water ran cold, kept showering even when he shivered.  It hadn’t been terrible; he shouldn’t have regretted it, and still he wasn’t able to bring himself to crawl into bed until he was sure the scent of a wolf that wasn’t his was as washed from his skin as it was going to get.

In bed alone, the moonlight hit the tattoo on his arm, and Chris followed the lines of his wolf with his finger.  Down the curve of the throat, across their belly, over the ears.  His arm burned.

It was not infidelity, not by half, and it was all in his head.  He was as utterly alone as he always had been.

Before he slept, he whispered, “I’m sorry.  I’m so fucking sorry.”  Whether it was for the sex or something else, even Chris wasn’t sure.

No one heard.

 

 

_v. choice; Glen Ellyn, Illinois_

Putting a gun in his own mouth wasn’t easy. 

The steps it took to reach the mental breaking point that made it possible were one thing; the physical logistics of it another.  The stretch was uncomfortable; the taste sickly bitter and metallic.  The first time, he gagged, sat it down with the safety still off and threw up in his bedside trash can.  Only a little, only bile, but he rinsed his mouth with whiskey he wasn’t yet old enough to buy before he tried again. 

If he had had an audience in that moment, he would have recommended that his cause of death be recorded as natural causes, the unavoidable result of 20 years of being Gerard Argent’s son. 

He wondered, sometimes, how much he and his father would have hated each other if his soulmate mark had been different, and the wondering shamed him.  He’d had a hard enough time distancing himself even with a solid reason to do it.  Without it, he’d have no doubt made more excuses for his father than he had already.  Without it, he might have, in some other world, ended up more like Kate. 

14 years old, and she’d set a boy near her own age on fire.  14, and she’d been given a shotgun to celebrate.  In showing her how to shoot it and bear the recoil, their father had touched her more lovingly than he had Chris since he was 7. 

His mother was distant even when she was home; his sister was a lost cause.  His father was a monster and always had been, and Chris was stuck in a perpetual coin flip between obedient soldier and  outright rebellion.  Try as he might, he’d never yet managed to choose a side. 

Waiting paralyzed him, and he loathed that he let it.  It was weakness to wait for his soulmate to force his hand, when he should have left or killed his father years ago.  It was weakness, but maybe that could be forgiven.  He was, after all, an unusual human, destined to be part of a pack and born outside one, into the most inhospitable place imaginable for a werewolf’s mate to be. 

He could hardly bear to imagine how he’d be after another decade of this, burnt out and drinking too much, hollowed out as much by what he hadn’t done as what he had.  The future seemed, then, an insurmountable thing for someone already so goddamn tired. 

He wrote no note; he had nothing to say, not to anyone who might find it.   All his words were for a stranger.  He had been storing them up for years, now, alongside the love in his chest.  It hadn’t faded, the longer he’d gone with no one to give it to; he had felt it first as a bubble in his throat of a truth he couldn’t speak when he was a boy, but it had grown to fill so much of him he felt weighed down with it.  If he’d been able to lighten the load, even a little, it might have been easier to carry, but there was nowhere else for it to go. 

He’d decided, recently, that might be for the best.

After another swish of whiskey, he stretched his jaw, and tried again.  It was his favorite pistol, his Desert Eagle.  A magnum, heavy when it fired, heavy on his tongue.  The safety was off; his finger on the trigger.  They would search his body for a bite, and find nothing. 

Chris breathed through his nose, and leaned into the windowsill.  The paint was still tacky; it hadn’t set well.  He’d painted when it was too cold, a distraction on a February afternoon.  It was spring, now, beautiful and bursting with color in this suburb of Chicago eager to shake off the last snow.  The sunlight was dazzling; it made his eyes water.

Has tattoo was stark against the inside of his arm, as rich with color in its own way as the trees outside.  It had settled into its final form some time ago; he’d never expected to be lucky enough to have a name, or a date, and he’d been right.  It was as inscrutable as it had ever been, a beautiful wolf with his eyes on fire, running like his life depended on it, or like someone else’s did.

He wasn’t sure, really, when he’d become so sure it was a him, and not a her, not a them.  After he’d slept with Gene, maybe, but honestly, he’d felt the truth of it before that, even before he’d changed how he thought of his wolf in his mind. 

There wasn’t much realism in the design, but sometimes, in the right light, there was something lifelike in his eyes, something impossibly close to awareness.  There was magic in the world, but there was no such thing as magic like that; if there was, he’d have heard of it.    He wouldn’t be seen; he couldn’t be, but he stared his own skin down anyway. 

His jaw ached.

Chris took the gun from his mouth, worked his jaw, slipped it in again.  The barrel was slick with spit, and it tasted no better than it had the first time.  He closed his eyes, and let himself see only the strange red-orange of his own blood backlit by the sun.

He remembered sunset last year in North Dakota, the light falling behind the hills, and a wolf in the woods howling.  It had stood up every hair on his arms, and on his father’s, too, for wholly different reasons.  They had found a wolf that afternoon torn apart by something bigger, something darker.  It was the kind of hunt that chilled his father and thrilled Chris down to his core, but the howling had seized up around his heart until he was half sure it had stopped. 

It was fall, and cold, and he had kept standing long after his dad went into the cabin, long after the night fell.  The howling never stopped, and he’d needed no translation to know that what he was hearing wasn’t a summons, or a rallying cry. 

They were screaming.  It was the sound of the wound left behind in the tearing off of their entire world; it was bloodletting.  It was intimate, private.  He shouldn’t have listened, and he hadn’t been able to turn away. 

It was no wonder, really, that so many wolves saw themselves as a higher form.  He had yet to meet a man who’d have been willing to lay himself bare like that; to flay out his own soul for casual observation.

_Every one of you has a soulmate, but this one was mine.  This one was the only one that mattered._

He took the gun out of his mouth, and gasped, heavy and wet.  Against the windowsill, his hand was trembling, his arm shaking so hard that when his eyes opened, the act of blinking the tears from his eyes made it look like his wolf’s paws were twitching. 

“I’m sorry; I’m sorry—Jesus, I’m so sorry.”

He said it again, and again, but it wasn’t a prayer; just an unfinished conversation.

With the edge of his thumb, he flicked the safety on.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last scene is an extended sequence of Chris nearly shooting himself- taking his gun in and out of his mouth several times and deliberating, etc. I wasn't sure about the tag 'attempted suicide', honestly, because he never pulls the trigger...but the type of suicide he's considering, there's not much of a way to attempt it and not complete it if the trigger were actually pulled, and he's doing all this with the safety off and with full intent, so...I deemed that close enough that 'attempted' was the best description. If this may be too upsetting for you to read I 100% understand, so if you'd like to read the story but not this part, stop reading when you reach "v. choice; Glen Ellyn, Illinois". 
> 
> If you would like a tl;dr that sums up the conclusion of this scene, it boils down to being unable to stop thinking about leaving his mate alone before they've ever even met him, and what he knows about how losing a mate tears a wolf up. As miserable as he is, and even not knowing him yet, he can't bring himself to do that to Peter.


	2. II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...you may notice the amount of chapters has gone up. There's two reasons for this-
> 
> 1\. The end is still the same, but in working on it, the middle sections got longer than anticipated, and I added a few of them that I think make the story better. So, it's a bit longer.
> 
> 2\. Original plan was to have 5 segments in each chapter...but when I was looking at posting this chapter, I realized there was actually enough material to stop this one at 3 segments, and have it end up a comparable size to the first chapter. And also, I feel like that segment made a better ending; chopping it off after the next two felt a little...stilted, idk. 
> 
> So, here is the next chapter.

  _vi._ _summit; Whitefish, Montana_

The summit was held in the shadow of the mountain, so close that it loomed above them in a way that seemed more menace than inspiration.  Chris had grown up loving wild places, but it was straight woodland that held his soul.  Towering peaks made him feel claustrophobic in a way he couldn’t shake, like the smallness of his own body was hemming him in.

The wooden table they stood around was carved and old, unfinished but worn smooth by time and weather and touch.  He wondered, approaching, if anyone with his blood had ever stood here, or if he was the first.  If he wasn’t, it wasn’t too off base to think that their blood might be in the wood still, that his might join it.  Even with the mountain pressing down on what would be left of him for decades to come, he could think of worse places to rest.

There was a tomb in France that bore his name, and it settled something in his chest some nights to reassure himself that whatever happened for the rest of life, he would never again lay eyes on it.  With any luck, no part of who he’d been would ever reach it, either.

The table was full; he was the last to arrive.  There was no question in his mind that Faye had planned it exactly that way—she stood closest to him, but like the others, her eyes were on his hands, her head tilted to listen for his heart.  She had agreed to allow him safe passage here, and a place at the table, but he was still a hunter, and she was still a werewolf. 

When he left his father behind over a year ago and set out on his own, it had taken time for reality to settle into his bones, heavy as lead.  He could leave his family behind, but not his name; not himself.  The tattoo on his arm didn’t change what he was, or what he knew.  To everyone around the table, here, he was a dangerous unknown, a ticking bomb. 

Slowly, Chris lifted his jacket, showing the butt of his magnum.  “I’ve got one here, and one on my ankle.  Three knives.  Let me take it all off.”

“You wouldn’t have had to, if you hadn’t brought it.”  The voice came from the left; a wolf he’d never met—though that held for most of the table.  He had brought himself into a den of neighbors and long distances allies, though for him they were strangers but for the alpha he’d met two years ago in woods barely a hundred miles from here.  They’d chased a wendigo together. 

When he’d read months later about the shunka warakin, he’d had the hope that she might remember him decently enough to let him cross into her land to look for it, when next the time was right.  The demon could possess a wolf only once every four years, and though it didn’t always happen, when it did, the results could be catastrophic.  If the demon took a true wolf, it was bloody for the farmers.  When they took a human and turned them, or a werewolf…history held records of enormous size, and the damage they’d wrought on communities on this land going back to oral Native American and First Nation tales, ancient paintings. 

In almost every record of the story, the wolf possessed took on a shade of unnatural red. 

Even reading the story and feeling his stomach sink, Chris had known it might have nothing to do with him, but he couldn’t shake the sick dread that it easily could.  As well as his life had gone to this point, it wouldn’t have been out of the question to meet his soulmate for the first time in the throes of possession. 

Though he’d reached out to Faye with the hope for a chance to intervene, an invitation to attend a secret meeting the packs had carried out for decades, now, to prepare for hunting the creature down on their own terms had never crossed his mind—either he’d made a better impression than he thought, or he’d only sparked her curiosity. 

It wouldn’t have been the first time.  He had collected it for years now, every place he’d let his mark be seen.  It wasn’t often  a hunter so openly carried the mark of a werewolf, and chose to keep carrying it—or so he’d been told by men who were too drunk to admit outright they’d have done what his father had threatened so many times and burned their son’s skin smooth rather than let him love something they feared. 

He never felt safe with hunters, but he didn’t feel safe at the table under the mountain, either.  He didn’t feel safe anywhere, and wasn’t sure he ever had for than a few half remembered moments, snatches of his childhood recorded before the truth became too clear to hide. 

Chris laid his second pistol onto the table, and the same man spoke again, careful and serious.  “Wolfsbane.”

“I’d be a fool if it wasn’t.”

“That wasn’t a question, Argent; you know we can smell it.”

“He knows.”  That voice was calmer—and though there was no head of the table, not really, she commanded the center of it with easy grace.  She was shorter than all of them, almost slight, and it didn’t matter.  Here at this table, he would have known her on sight from the stories alone—as a woman, or a wolf.  Most of the stories he’d heard as a boy centered there, on the terrifying specter of a line of alphas black as midnight, the same pitch black even in the sunlight in a way few true wolves ever would have been. 

“I’m not here to cause trouble; I’m here for the demon,” Chris said.  He felt a muscle in his arm jump with the half-truth, and knew they’d have heard it in his heart as a lie.  Before they could draw the wrong conclusions, he curled his fingers quick around the end of his sleeve, tugging his jacket up so hard it bit into his skin, leaving his mark visible.  In the light of the lanterns at the table, the color of the wolf made the skin on the inside of his forearm all the more pale.  “I’m here for the one he possesses.  If they can be saved—“

“They can’t; possession by this demon is irreversible.  Once they become the red wolf, we can only kill them.”  Carmen Hale’s surety was final, and damning, and it might have cut him with fear more than it did if he hadn’t then looked up to meet her eyes.  It didn’t last, but for a breath before she blinked they were wide, full to the brim with recognition.  Somewhere, she had seen his wolf before, and it wasn’t on some poor bastard about to be possessed by a Stone Age demon. 

His heart beat quicker in his chest, so fast that he could feel the uncomfortable flutter of it.  His mouth watered with how much he wanted to ask, and he swallowed it down.  Not there, not at an ancient table where every pair of eyes judged him and there was too much at stake. 

Carmen Hale’s gaze dragged from his, to the wolf, to the guns.  In the shadows, they looked cold as flint.  “If you’re here to help us track the demon down, then be ready to listen.  You’re here at our invitation and we can rescind it.  You may intend not to cause trouble—whether you will regardless remains to be seen.”

Chris tugged his sleeve down, and felt her looking still—even after he’d stepped back, even with it fully covered, his arms crossed over his chest.  “Alright.  I know how I’d do it, but I’m listening.  How do werewolves banish a demon?”

The planning carried from dusk until the stars had shifted above them, Orion rising so high the tip of his bow would have touched the mountain.  By the time his chance came the hunter was hidden from view behind the horizon, the group dispersing piece by piece in twos and threes into the trees.  Despite the chill he’d felt in her eyes, Chris would have risked following Carmen into the woods, but he didn’t have to.  His last knife was slipping into his pocket and then she was there, studying him with an intensity that would have made his skin crawl if he wasn’t so eager for what she knew.

“You’ve seen it before.”  No strength of will could have kept the want from his voice; he didn’t try. 

“Yes.  I’ve seen it before—far from here.  The one you’re looking for isn’t about to die if you get this wrong.  This isn’t your fight; you don’t have to stay.”

“I’m here; I’m staying.”  Depending on perspective, it was his fight, but he wasn’t about to debate that with her.  It was enough that he would stay, and see if he could build if not a bridge at least a few open lines of communication.  “If we survive this, will you tell me who he is?”

The woods were quiet.  The crowd had left, and nothing dared stir, yet, with the scent of so many alphas in the air.  Chris could hear his breath and hers, taking up the space before she answered. 

“I’ll tell you this—he’s still a boy.  His pack won’t part with him, yet.”

In retrospect he should have known then, perhaps, but she was so steady, so cool, and he was only a man.  He couldn’t read her heart; just her eyes.  They didn’t flash; they didn’t even blink.  For a mother staring down the man who from her view may someday come to try and take her son, her control was impeccable. 

In the moment, he knew none of it, and defended himself anyway.

“He’s going to be the alpha; I wouldn’t try to—“

“They’ll never be ready to see him with a man like you.”  For words that might have almost come through his father’s lips, she said them with a strange lack of disdain.  Only honest, and firm.  “But I’ll also give you this—red wolves are more common in the east.  If we survive, go there.  Make a name for yourself that isn’t so tarnished.  Give his pack a reason to consider you, when you find them.”

He’d been all over the country; it wasn’t exactly a hardship—not at all, and certainly not if it helped. 

Two and a half weeks later, he took his Range Rover and carried the lie with him toward the sunrise. 

 

_vii. alignment; Valdosta, Georgia_

Chris met Annie with his arrow already in her arm, pinning her to a willow.  Her nails scrabbled at the bark and at her own skin so fiercely that the blood ran faster, and for half a second it was the red that caught him first. 

The size of her fingers was second; the size of her wrist.  They were so thin he’d have almost thought he could snap them, if he hadn’t known already what she was.  Her blue eyes flared so bright in the light of his flashlight that their glow seemed almost unreal, even for a wolf.  Blue like ice, gleaming and sharp.  She was too young to have regrets.

The kills that had brought him to town were pets, mostly, and one police officer.  An old man lay a half mile behind them, at least, gasping out his last in the tall grass behind his house.  Even if Chris had stayed rather than given chase, it would have been too late to save him.  In the back of his mind, the thought slipped through and around the blood and the panting and the harsh light that it said something about him, this choice that he’d made.  He could have stayed with the victim; he could have held his hand.  He could have let her go, and hunted her again—she was far too young to stop herself, and it was clear by how wild she’d already run that no one was helping her.  No one knew, yet, what she’d become.

If he had chased her down to end this, his father would have assured him that he’d done the right thing.  It would have, most likely, been the choice even his mother made. 

Chris knelt by the tree, just out of range of the snap of her teeth, the ineffective swipe of her single free arm.  He could feel her fear pressing against his chest like a fog. 

“Easy.  I know it hurts.  If you settle down; I’ll take it out.” 

The first twelve or twenty tries, there was no recognition in her eyes, but he waited until his knees ached, the tendons in his feet and ankles drawn tight with position and lack of movement.  At 25 he was still in his prime, but hunting took a toll, and he’d never been the best at taking care of himself.  He pushed himself until it hurt and past it, every time. 

When the points of her ears rounded, her beta form melting into human features, she looked even smaller.  She was 7, 8—no older than 10 at the very latest, if she was small for her age.  The blood on her own hand made her cry, and he laid his hand against her back, rubbing gently.  It was a warm night, and still her shirt felt too thin.

“It’s okay.  It’s okay.  Just settle down and I’ll pull it out, okay?”

“I didn’t mean to; I didn’t mean—he’s always so scary, but I didn’t mean—“  Her voice trailed higher and higher, her breath sharp, and Chris pressed his hand between her shoulders until she sniffled, and turned her face against his shirt.  Her free arm twisted into it, clinging tight.  He’d shot her, and still all it took to be welcomed as her rescuer was a little kindness, a little time. 

He barely realized he’d bitten down too hard on the side of his tongue until he tasted the blood. 

“I know you didn’t.  Close your eyes, honey.”  His fingers brushed the shaft of his arrow, but didn’t pull.  It had gone deep. 

“Annie,” she said, muffled against his chest. 

“Annie.”  His fingers closed around the arrow, grip tightening until his knuckles were white.  “I’m Chris.”

“Like Christopher Robin.”  She nestled deeper; he could feel her chin jabbing into him. 

“Yeah.  Like Christopher Robin.  Close your eyes, and don’t look up until I tell you.  This is going to hurt.” 

Rather than pull, he snapped the arrow clean, and pulled her arm off the end.  She wailed, still, and for a moment her claws came back, pricking into his shirt and past, dotting him with blood.  When they retracted, he picked her up, hefted against his side.  She clung to him like a koala, and he carried her to the car to drive her home.  She had her address memorized, she told him; she’d had to for school. 

If the cops came this far from the scene the next day, they would have found only the blood, and the mark in the willow where his arrow had been.  The ground was too dry to have left prints, and he was as glad for that as he was that she fell asleep against his passenger door, her arm already healed, the moonlight turning her hair silver.

She was not the first werewolf he helped, but she was, arguably, the first he’d made a priority.  It may have been true before her, but he had never felt it in such a heavy, conscious way as he did carrying her up the steps to her front door, knowing he’d left a man behind to die alone so that he could bring this little girl home. 

His father would have called her a monster.  At his mother’s request they were always lenient with the young, but Annie had killed, more than once.  She would, most likely, do it again—and she’d drawn more than enough attention to herself. 

If he hadn’t followed her, tonight, next month he wouldn’t have been the only one in town. 

Rather than let that happen, he’d made a choice, and though his trajectory had likely been decided from the minute his tattoo had made itself clear, short of leaving his family behind and driving off in a car he’d bought 30 minutes before, few choices he’d made had ever felt so final. 

When her mother, Cynthia, came to the door, he made another choice, and told her everything. 

When he looked at her after, a single mother with too much already on her plate, crying in her kitchen and steeling herself to do what she had to do to learn how to help her daughter, it wasn’t hard to choose to stay.  Just for a while, just until they were on their feet. 

He ordered mountain ash from a contact in Texas, and rigged her a safe place that didn’t look like a cage.   He helped her find an anchor, in the book handed down from her mother’s father, with its tattered blue cover, and an old style Pooh in the middle, holding hands with Piglet.  It was such a childish thing it made his throat burn with the reminder that that’s all she was, really—a baby, who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, bitten by an alpha who hadn’t even stuck around to claim her. 

He stayed, and learned from her, until he couldn’t anymore.  He couldn’t become a permanent fixture in her life; he’d become too much of an influence already on a family that wasn’t his.

It had been years since his arm burned when he ended up in someone else’s bed, but it left a bad taste in his mouth all the same, every time.  It was good in the moment, mostly, but after, with his breath settling and the sweat drying, he would feel the itch in his chest that hadn’t been sated.  More often than he would have considered polite, he let it drive him out of bed and to a bottle, or at the least, to silence.

Cynthia understood.  The blue and white tile on the inside of her thigh didn’t match him anymore than it had Annie’s father, but that was fine.  She didn’t have the time to look; she didn’t even have the desire.  She had her daughter, and she was enough.  It was surreal, seeing a parent like that, realizing with a strange lick of shame that they did, in fact, exist. 

On the wide back porch in Valdosta he could sit shirtless in the summer heat in a rocker older than himself and listen to the katydids high chattering, confused mockingbirds calling out their songs right along with them at past 2 AM.  He could sip Cynthia’s Johnnie Walker, and smoke, and wonder if the boy he looked everywhere for was as safe as he’d done his best to ensure Annie would be.  He wondered if he was a boy at all, now; how old he had been when Carmen Hale saw him. 

After 6 months half out of the life, he knew he’d go back to it different, but he’d intended to change himself all along.  It didn’t prickle at him like it once might have to wonder what the others would say about him, if they heard.  He was a hunter, still, but he was something else, too. 

Try as his fear and doubt might, he didn’t really feel any failure in that. 

When he left Georgia, Annie climbed him like a jungle gym and pressed her face into his neck, huffing soft and low under his ear in a way that could only remind him of a pup.  Her skinny little arms were strong around his shoulders, and he held her with half her force, gentle around ribs he could never be strong enough to really hurt. 

“I’ll miss you, Christopher Robin.”  Her voice was like music.  It played in his head all the way to the coast. 

 

_viii. vision; Kittery, Maine_

To look at it, the house in Maine didn’t broadcast itself as a witch’s home.  It was brilliant sky blue, the sharply tilted New England roof a fittingly light grey.  The shutters were white.  It looked clean, almost like a dollhouse. 

Kate had gotten one when she was 6, over the summer at the house in France.  He remembered putting together little window boxes for her, collecting dirt, checking it for worms and pillbugs. 

On the outside, this house was simple, like that one had been.  Inside, the very air was thick with magic, so heavy and cloying he took a moment to stand in the mud room and breathe.  Vines covered the walls, weaving their way through skulls and shells and rough rope.  He could hear rustling, now and then, but there was no wind, and he could see nothing moving.  In the entry way alone, the house already unsettled him more than the last four years of increasingly turning his talents to helping werewolves more than he hunted them ever had. 

Slow, breathing deep, Chris rolled up his sleeves, and reminded himself why he’d come.  He was 27, almost 28.  Carmen Hale had spoken to him at 23 about a boy he’d never laid eyes on, and his patience was wearing thin.  Some, he knew, looked their whole lives and never found their soulmate, never saw them even once.  He couldn’t stomach it.  He’d borne this mark all his life, even when it had brought him hell, even when it cost him his family’s love.  Even when it forced him to survive them.

It had changed him, and that couldn’t be for nothing.  Whatever fate was in store for him, it couldn’t be static and silence; the price had been too high. 

Moses Webster had been emissary to a pack that watched over the Carrabassett Valley for over a hundred years.  They loved him, still, and presumably he felt the same, but he’d let a difference of opinion drive him into half retirement, and hours to the south.  Disconnected from his own land, he’d only grown harder to deal with, but there was kindness in him that couldn’t be shaken out, and there were ways, still, to gain enough of his favor to be granted an audience. 

Chris had worked hard, for his, but it was worth it.  He knew it before he stepped into this house, knew it more when he stepped out of it.  In the room upstairs with its slanted roof and improbable pond built into the middle of the goddamn floor, he’d known it, perhaps, most of all. 

The water wasn’t clear.  It swirled grey-green, like a lake a thousand times its size might be.  Duckweed clustered in one corner; the edges were rimmed in moss, living and growing under the lights Moses had fixed to the ceiling. 

Later, he would describe to Peter how it felt—how the water seemed to pull on his ankles, like something within it wanted him deeper. 

 _Fairies_ , Peter would tell him, his body pressed hard against Chris’, lips and teeth and a hint of tongue brushing the skin on the back of his neck as Peter breathed him in.  _You fucking lovesick fool_. 

Sitting on the edge of the pond, he hadn’t had room in his mind for worry, only impatience.  Moses pressed the redwood sliver into his palm, sharpened and smoothed into needle precision. 

“Put it into your arm, deep, as close as you can to the soulmate mark, then put your arm into the water.”  His eyebrows rose, though Chris had barely hesitated.  “It’ll heal, if you hold it in the water, for as long as you can stand to.  Just watch the surface, and keep your eyes open.”

Chris nodded, rolling the redwood splinter in his fingers.  The end was so sharp. 

“Remember, you probably aren’t seeing the future, not yours.  You’ll more likely be seeing—“

“What could be, yeah.  Another me that’s like this.  Another set of us.” 

“I hope you’re ready.”

Chris didn’t bother looking up.  The door closed, and he could hear the water murmuring around his skin as he slid his legs a little deeper down.  The pond couldn’t possibly have been as deep as it felt; there wasn’t room in the floor.  The surreality of it all was making his head pound, but magic was what he had come for.  He wouldn’t be leaving until he had tasted of it more deeply than a dip in a pond that shouldn’t be. 

He pressed the redwood in under his skin at an angle like a needle, and it hurt at least as much as he’d expected.  The sharpness wasn’t unusual, but the way it burned was worse; the uncomfortable jolt of feeling it move under his skin when he hurried to drop his arm into the water nearly elbow deep.  In the air, before, he could see the blood running down his wrist.  Once it hit the water, there was no red, and no grey-green.  No duckweed. 

The surface shook like a rattled curtain, and settled into snow, and pine, and mud.  A frozen lake, and an off-white sky.  Himself, older, crouching behind an oak, his fingers buried deep in the thick ruff of a red-brown wolf, black and grey ticking rising like smoke up his forelegs, across his shoulders. 

Chris’ cheeks were wet; the pain of the redwood, or the pain of recognition.  Either, both.  It didn’t matter.  He could feel moss and fur under his fingers, cold air and the unnatural warmth of the house.  It was like standing in a hall of mirrors, moving within an echo of himself and outside of it all at once. 

“I’ll wait for your signal as long as I can, but if you aren’t back and they need help—“

His wolf growled, deep and rattling, traveling up his arm.  The wolf’s head turned to take his coat in his teeth, shaking the sleeve sharp, just once. 

“No.  I’m not going with you; we stick to the plan—and don’t even think about it; you shift back and we’ll have the same argument we had in the car.  They’re kids; they don’t know what’s out here.  I’m not—“

Whatever the other him wasn’t, Chris couldn’t catch it.  The water rippled again, like a breeze across the surface, and there was blood on the snow.  A bonfire; four tents.  A crossbow was in Chris’ hand, and he fired into the shadows at something that might have looked an ordinary Fallow deer, if not for the blood on its hooves and in its teeth.  Behind him and around him, the wolf darted in and out of the light—and Chris could hardly fail to see that even like this, they moved with concert of long familiarity. 

The creatures were herded into place for the bow, or by a stray shot into place for his wolf’s teeth.  It would have looked like choreography, if he wasn’t watching it all play out, his eyes catching on little adjustments that could have been missteps if they hadn’t been so in tune with each other.  His foot sliding for a moment on a patch of leaves; the wolf nearly skidding too close to the fire.  Both times they braced each other, and moved on, and barely looked back. 

In the woods, over the crackle of the flames he could hear screaming; in the room, his own breath.  His arm trembled under the water, the quickness of his breath a measure to counter the sharpness of the pain. 

The water rippled. 

Pain shot through his opposite shoulder so harsh and hot he nearly fell back—it was only discipline that kept him.  The witch had reminded him to hold on until he couldn’t.  The image coming onto focus on the pond’s surface reminded him _why_. 

He could feel the heat of the bonfire against his side; the chill of the ground against his ass and his thighs.  His own blood pumped from his right shoulder, and a tear on the inside of his right elbow that had the hollow throb of a wound made by teeth and pressure.  All of it was pressing, and still none of it dried his mouth as much as the feeling of strong arms around him, holding him half off the ground. 

The man who held him was naked in the snow, and didn’t look out of place.  There was an ease to him even covered in blood and tight with tension, a belonging in his own skin that Chris himself had never mastered.  The firelight cast a red glow to his brown hair, and soft gold against his skin.  His eyes before they gleamed were a stunning blue, though they flared golden amber as quick as a spark when Chris gasped in pain. 

“Be _still_.”  His voice was almost a growl, so like the wolf in the woods that from the edge of the pond, Chris almost smiled. 

“It’s not that bad; it’ll heal up.”  It would, but with damage, maybe.  He’d never felt his shoulder burn like that, not in his own memory, and not in his mirrored self, either. 

Blood welled in his shoulder, spilling over like a lazy fountain.  His soulmate covered it with his hand, and the shock of pain spread to a tingling warmth, like an egg cracked on his bone and running down through his veins.  Watching, he could see the wolf’s veins go black, see his jaw grit as he bore pain that wasn’t his, but had already been hurting him even so.  The black traced up and around a running wolf identical to his own, fading into its color, spreading out and settling in. 

“You do this every time; the ungrateful little shits get off scot-free and you—“

“I’m fine.”

“You aren’t—“

“I’m _fine_.”

“It’s not worth it!”  He snapped, so sharp and quick that for a moment a hint of gold touched the blue of his eyes.  “You take stupid risks.  You could have died; you realize that?  You could have had an antler in your _lung_ , you—“

“Peter,” he said, lower, almost soft, and breaking the wolf’s momentum all the same.  Chris' left hand reached up to grip at the back of his neck, holding tight and squeezing, his own tattoo lit bright by the fire.  “I’m with you, okay?  I’m staying with you.  Just let me catch my breath.”

On the ground, his body tingled with a fresh wave of relief as his lover eased his pain; on the edge of the pond, the tingle in his throat so strong it felt nearly closed in from it was all to do with the weight of a name.   For all his life, he had been his wolf, his soulmate.  His alpha, sometimes, but only to himself, only in the quiet at night. 

Now, he was Peter. 

Peter, who nodded even though it was stiff, and turned to nuzzle his arm with far more fluidity.  Peter, who weathered his pain with him until the most of it that he could feel was the redwood splinter, stabbing sharper and sharper. 

By the fire, Peter kissed him, and his mouth tasted like blood and lake water and cinnamon.  Chris should not have wanted more of it, not with the taste of Peter’s kills so fresh in his mouth, but he arched his neck into it anyway.   The curl of his tongue was as hot as the licks from the fire, the pressure of his teeth blunted but firm.  It was dizzying, and Chris held onto it for as long as he could—

Until he could no longer feel Peter’s neck under his palm, but only the water, and the pain.  When that happened, he jerked his arm free and rolled clear of the pond, onto moss that grew like a carpet across the floor until it faded more seamlessly than it should have into hardwood floor.  Even the floor felt unnaturally warm. 

Chris laid his cheek against it to pant, getting his bearings.  The redwood splinter was gone from his arm, taken, presumably, as payment by something unseen in the water. 

Peter.  His eyes were are sharp and beautiful as cut glass, and his name was Peter.  Even before he’d recovered, he was sure beyond doubt it was a name he’d already heard. 

Back in his hotel room, he opened the notebook where he kept what information he had on active, stable packs, flipping well-worn pages to reach the Hales.  Carmen had been decent enough to talk to that he’d folded down the corner. 

His fingers skimmed his own writing, passing names and gaps left for unknowns.  _Carmen Hale, mate Emmanuel Garcia, daughter Talia Hale, son Brandon Hale, deceased—_

The tips of fingers pressed down so hard they smudged the pencil. 

_son, Peter Hale_

Not just any boy, but hers.  It was no wonder that she had sent him east, knowing what he was.  He could only hope that she would understand that knowing what _Peter_ was, nothing could keep him away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, I'm sorry there's still no actual Peter yet, just some pseudo Peter in that last bit...but I promise that's coming in the next chapter. I really hope you guys like this...strangely, even though I'm very nervous about it, I'm also really enjoying writing this story, so. I hope you guys are enjoying reading it, too.


	3. III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys are wonderful and I love you <3 Thank you so, so much to everyone reading this. 
> 
> This chapter is part of the mid-story expansions...this part just seemed too important to not cover a little more fully.

  _ix._ _convergence_

_ix.i Beacon Hills, California; the woods_

Even at his worst, Chris had never stopped believing in fate.  He had held to that constant like a lifeline, gripped tighter even when his fingers bled.  He wasn’t a skeptic on this, not by any stretch, and still it gave him a strange flutter in his chest to realize that by a combination of luck and design, he would cross into the Hale woods on the night of the hunter’s moon.

It was an odd feeling, surreal and tingling, pressing like needles into his palms where he touched his steering wheel.  All his life had led to the introduction he’d make that evening, or the next day, or the next.  It was more than momentous, and it was beyond strange to remind himself as he had a dozen times at least after crossing the state line that really, this was only just the beginning.  The end of an era, and the start of another he could only hope he was ready for. 

He had traveled slow, to make it there on the full moon.  Standing in his hotel room in Maine he’d been so goddamn eager he nearly left his car and took a flight, but common sense had shaken that out of him.  Carmen Hale hadn’t wanted him near her son four years ago; that wasn’t likely to have changed.  If he wanted to see Peter, to have a chance to get his foot in the door before the pack interrupted, he would have to get him alone.  There was no time he’d be more certain to be in the woods than on the full moon, the pull driving him to motion, to running where his paws could bite into his own land. 

If Chris wanted the best shot at a first impression untainted by Carmen’s concern, he would have to hunt, and be hunted, and have faith that he’d find what he’d come for. 

In another life, he might have approached her directly, but faith came in varieties.  He trusted himself to find Peter, trusted Peter to accept him.  He didn’t hold that kind of faith in family or diplomacy, not yet, not even though he wanted to. 

He took the Desert Eagle, in his coat.  One knife against his ankle.  His crossbow was carried slung across his back; his hands were empty.  It was as light as he felt he could go, and still not light enough that there wouldn’t be questions.  Still, in the pocket of his coat there was wolfsbane, and a lighter.  His preparations were not single minded; they hadn’t been for years. 

The moon was low when he started into the trees, barely higher when he heard the first howl.  The Hale lands were enormous, and he’d started remote, far from the house.  He may have had little experience with romance, then, but he held on, still, to what he’d been told at 17, what he’d felt sure of years before he’d ever had it confirmed—he would smell like mate, to his wolf.  What that would be like he couldn’t imagine, but Peter would know him.  Peter would come to him.  They could find each other in the dark of the woods like two predators circling the same kill. 

For all his hope, it didn’t completely shock him when Talia Hale found him first.  Disappointment roiled in his stomach and nailed his boots to the outcropping beneath him, stock still as he stared down a midnight black wolf with amber eyes.  She had the tall, narrow look of a young wolf, still, but there was more solid rage than fear in the curl of her lip.  At best, he would have been a trespasser, dangerously armed.  At worst, her mother had already warned her about him.

If Carmen hadn’t already told her, the match to her brother would still be unmistakable if she saw the tattoo, unless she was completely out of her head in a way a born wolf wasn’t likely to be.  It didn’t bother him so much, really.  He hadn’t come here to hide. 

Chris held his hands up, and hoped she was calm enough to reason, practiced enough to feel the moon in her blood and keep her own mind. 

“I’m just here to talk.”

Her legs were stiff; she walked like a rabid dog.  The snarl rumbling in her chest couldn’t have sounded less human. 

“Talia?”  For all his suspicion, for all that she looked old enough to be the heir who wouldn’t be, he couldn’t be certain.  She could have been a relative; a child whose name he hadn’t known.  “Talia, I need to see him.  He’ll want to see me.”  On the last, his heart ticked, and he hated it.  It wasn’t a lie; he was almost certain of it.  His body was just running too hot, too high strung. 

She took another step, and Chris hovered on the point of drawing his crossbow, so close to reaching for it his bicep had tensed before the motion.

She was knocked off her feet before he ever touched it.  He would realize, later, in remembering, that for a young wolf moving at such speed, he’d have expected more sound from the underbrush before it happened, but Peter ran as lightly as he walked.  He could have hidden himself in a goddamn church; in the woods, with human ears and the noises of the night to drown him out, Talia might have had a chance to brace herself or get out the way, but Chris had never seen him coming.

The initial hit was over fast, and there were only flashes of red-brown on black, a burst of white teeth, a scattering of kicked up leaves.  Both their jaws popped sharp and loud when they snapped, connecting more with air than they did each other.  It was a fight with rounded edges, but a fight nonetheless, and one that ended as suddenly as it had begun.  They faced off, their jaws inches apart, lips curled—Peter’s teeth were all the way exposed with the force of his silent snarl, long and just barely open with the heaviness of his breath.  His tail was held high, hackles so sharply raised he reminded Chris for a just a moment of a razorback.  Talia had inches on him, and bulk, and it didn’t matter.  If she moved toward Chris again, Peter would make solid contact this time; the threat of it couldn’t be clearer. 

The urge to call to him was strong, but Chris wouldn’t be the one to break the moment.  Something passed between them—whether through the pack bond on a level he couldn’t sense, or some small shift in body language, but they bounced back from each other almost as quickly as they’d come together, like repelling magnets. 

Talia took off like a shot into the trees.  Peter huffed at her heels, but didn’t bother to watch her go, springing off instead back toward Chris.

The sound of Peter’s nails scrabbling at dirt and rock as he bolted uphill sounded distant, secondhand to the pounding of his own heart.  He’d never felt it so clearly.  Peter was small, for a wolf, but Chris was still light in comparison, ragdoll easy for Peter to knock off balance with a solid hit from his shoulder. 

He drove Chris all the way back to the ground with his bulk; Chris’ crossbow clattered to the side.  Neither one of them noticed.  The rock rising up from the ground on the little hill he’d stood on dug into his back and his ass; he could feel it biting into his skin where his shirt had ridden up.  He’d skimmed his palms, in first falling back; he could feel the sting.  It didn’t matter.  Peter’s fur was rough under his hands on his shoulders, soft underneath when he dug his fingers in and held on.

If he’d had to describe it, after, he might have agreed with the kind of poetry he’d read in stories and history all his life—holding Peter to his chest even like that had felt like closing a circuit, like grounding, like striking flint.  The truth in the moment as he remembered it was far simpler.  He could feel Peter’s breath under his palms in the shift of his shoulders, feel it against his throat where his wolf’s muzzle had nuzzled in close.  The noises that rose from Peter’s chest were nothing like the growl that had chased Talia into the dark.  The rumble Chris could feel as much as hear was low and soft, no element of show to it, only an overflow of desperate relief.    

It wasn’t fire and heat that Chris felt, with Peter’s weight pressing into his chest.  Holding him for the first time was more the slow lifting of a fog that had choked everything that came before, a twitchy settling like collapsing into bed after hours and hours of working himself to the bone.  A deep breath; pain relieved. 

His eyes were wet, and he pressed them against Peter’s neck, where his fur thinned right before his jaw.  He felt warm, there, and Chris leaned into the heat of him against his eyelids until he felt his fur grow damp.

Against his, Peter’s chest vibrated still with his whining, too soft to travel far but loud in Chris’ ears.  He nodded without pulling back, his voice rough and stilted when he let himself speak. 

“Yeah.  Yeah, I missed you, too.”  It was, really, the only word he had for it.  He had planned for this, and it felt nothing like how he’d expected.  Not like a meeting, but like a reunion.  Like the old tales were true, and they were really a soul split in half, the two of them placed incomplete with too much distance between them. 

Peter pulled back enough to bump his nose under Chris’ chin, his teeth catching for a minute on the collar of Chris’ jacket before he was snuffling at the pocket that held the wolfsbane, then lower, against the sleeve that covered his tattoo.

“It was just in case, I can—“

Peter sprang off of him, over the crossbow, farther along the rocky ridge of ground.  He didn’t need his voice; _follow me_ was in his eyes, in the way he looked over his shoulder, in the curve of his tail. 

In getting to his feet, the grit of dirt and stone pressed into his stinging palms.  Dusting them off, he left blood on his jeans, and followed his wolf into the woods. 

_ix.ii Beacon Hills, California; the nemeton_

Moonlight spilled down through the roots of the tree, scattered like sunlight on the dirt floor.  Given the canopy above that ringed the clearing around the stump, the light in the place where Peter had led him seemed stronger than it should have been, but that was all in the tree.  Chris knew it when he felt the air change, knew it more when he reached out and touched a root, and felt the pulse of it against his palm. 

The five-fold knot was only a confirmation.  Stepping closer, he skimmed his fingers over it, tracing the curves.  The magic of the tree hadn’t faded.  It felt hungry.  “A nemeton.  I’m not surprised there was one, here.”  He had heard, time and again, about Beacon Hills.  He’d been here, more than once.  How many times might he have seen Peter, and never known him?  How many times had his father almost shot him?

He couldn’t hear Peter, moving in the shadows, but he could feel him—after years and years of searching, it was the strangest sensation.  A pleasant soreness, like a muscle he’d only recently begun to work.  Like new fingers flexing. 

“You know Talia’s gone to get your mother.  We should have stayed to talk to her.”  Following Peter, the high of finding him had settled enough to begin to think again of practicalities, of Carmen and what she’d said to him in Montana. 

_They’ll never be ready to see him with a man like you._

“I wanted to talk to you myself, first,”  Peter said, in a voice that was and wasn’t familiar.  He had heard it, in the house in Maine, but it was different, then.  Older, but less immediate, too.  It sounded different, there in the same room, with no barrier of magic between them.

On instinct, Chris turned toward Peter’s voice, and still couldn’t place him.  He moved out of sight, in the recesses of the cellar furthest from the roots. 

Chris moved, too, putting the tree to his back.  He could feel it, an awareness behind him, brushing his back with tendrils that didn’t feel altogether uncomfortable.  Questioning, curious.  “We should talk.  Come out, and we will.”

“Take off your jacket and I might.”

“You aren’t afraid of me.”  It wasn’t a question, wouldn’t have been even if Peter hadn’t thrown himself at him in the woods.  He didn’t feel any fear, here.  Usually, he could tell.  Still, he eased the jacket from his shoulders, his magnum with it.  The cross bow he’d already left at the foot of the stairs.  “Like I said, it’s just a precaution.”

“Maybe I just wanted to see your arm.  It’s not always about what you’re packing.”

Chris couldn’t have said which was more unexpected, the ease in his voice or the innuendo, the strangeness of words off his tongue that sounded both soft and sharp.  It startled a laugh from him regardless, real, tugging his mouth up into a smile he didn’t try to hide. 

He held his arm out into the light where it was strongest, the beam that fell to hit the five-fold knot.  He had the fleeting thought, even then, that it was right, that Peter had brought them here.  If they were going to work, and they had to, they were _promised_ to, balance was exactly what they’d have to find.  Delicate, and sturdy enough to bear both their worlds on its axis. 

“There.  That’s mine.  You going to let me see yours?”

“You’re looking at it.  Mine doesn’t look any different.”  There was wry humor there, and still, his voice came closer.  It should have been stranger than it was that he was naked and Chris wasn’t, but it wasn’t hard to look at his eyes.  There were every bit as stunning in person as they had been in the pool, beautifully blue, with such a spark of life in them it took Chris’ breath to look too long.  He was younger than Chris, but not as young as he’d wondered if he would be.  Not a boy; not anymore.  The tattoo on his arm when he held it up was beautifully familiar, utterly identical.  “See?”

“I do.”  Chris moved closer, Peter sideways.  It was almost a dance, with a good 10 feet still between them.  “You seemed a lot happier to see me before.”

“I have to be careful, trusting his judgment.  He’s rarely wrong, but he is impetuous.”

“You say that like he isn’t you.”

“Oh, don’t be mistaken; we’re one and the same, but he’s what you get when you take away my filter—at least, he’s far more likely to be.”  Peter’s head tilted, his eyes bright.  The smile that barely crooked his mouth made Chris’ heart skip.  “Useful for many things, but he isn’t subtle.  If I’m conflicted, he’ll show the strongest emotion.”

“So you _are_ that happy to see me.”  Another step, and he was further from the roots, Peter closer to the full moonlight.  “You don’t have to hide it—I think I made it clear enough you’re welcome.”

“I’m not hiding it.  I’ve been looking for you all my life; I don’t think either one of us doubts exactly what this is.”  Peter eyes flicked over his arm, back to his eyes, to the side, and the nemeton.  Chris’ coat, hanging on a root.  “You aren’t what I expected.” 

It hurt with a sharp pain, needle quick.  If he’d been with anyone else, it wouldn’t have showed on his face—and maybe it didn’t.  Maybe it was in his scent, in the twitch of his fingers, in some other tell only Peter would have felt. 

Regardless, before he could find a defense, Peter sighed.  Fond irritation, like you’d save for a reassurance already given a hundred times, rather than one never given at all. 

“That’s not what I meant.  You’re more sensitive than you look.”

“I’m not—“  He _was_ , but the denial was reflex.  Peter didn’t wait for him to finish it, though, and it was an odd relief to let it go.

“I expected someone who knew nothing.  Who’d find a werewolf a…novelty.”  His thumb brushed over his own arm, tracing the line of silver around the wolf’s neck.  As a boy, Chris hadn’t been able to deny the similarities to a collar, but he’d never given enough thought to how it might look to his wolf, growing up and looking down time and again at the implication that he may someday allow himself to be constrained, because fate said he should.  “But you aren’t that.  You know better.”

“I do.  You aren’t something to tame; that’s not why I’m here.”

“Why _are_ you here?  There haven’t been any deaths, nothing to draw you.”

“You’re the draw.”  The brief flash of confusion in Peter’s eyes told him enough, though he’d known already when the hurt settled after Peter’d told him he wasn’t what he’d expected.  Carmen hadn’t warned him his soulmate was a hunter—she hadn’t mentioned meeting him at all. 

Looking back on it, years later, Chris would wonder what would have happened, next, if he’d lied.  He doesn’t have many regrets, but the moment at the base of the nemeton, holding the truth on his tongue and deciding to give it, that one has kept him up more nights than he can say, more nights than Peter knows.  He had told Carmen he wouldn’t come to take Peter from his pack.  If he had lied to Peter, then, maybe what he’d said to her years before would have stayed true.  

In another world, somewhere, this happened.  He embellished on what he learned from Moses’ pond, maybe, or maybe he gave the credit to another hunter who’d seen him.  Somewhere else, there is a version of the two of them that stayed in Beacon Hills without years on the road in-between, and made a place for themselves in the Hale house with its dozens of rooms and land to spare. 

Somewhere else, maybe Peter’s eyes on his arm are gold. 

In this world, where he was selfish enough to crave Peter’s trust like a hit of something sweeter than he’d ever tasted, he told the truth. 

“I met your mother, years ago.  I’d have come here then, but she told me just enough to point me in the wrong direction.  I’ve been looking for you up and down the east coast—then I saw an emissary in Maine and he helped me figure it out.  I knew where to come as soon as I had your name.”

The confusion hadn’t left him; it made him look younger.  “And this whole time, she knew—“

“She said you were young—and you were, this was years ago, and for obvious reasons she didn’t trust me.  I can’t blame her for that.”  Not that part, at least.  He had learned a little more in the last few years what it looked like to a wolf to have a hunter pull up outside their house.  In their world, _he_ was the monster in the dark, full of venom and teeth.  

“I can.  She knew how much I wanted—“  He was breathing faster, his eyes gleaming first at the edges, then further.  He stood so tall, Chris had almost forgotten, for a moment, that he was still young, that the moon was still full.  “She’s lied to me.  God, I’ve asked her—so many times, every time she’s travelled I’ve asked—“  His voice cut off a growl, guttural and low.  Chris could see a flash of fang, growing, pressing his lip.

He should have been afraid.  Everything he’d grown up with had told him to be—from his father to his training.  He had shot a friend, before.  He had felt the urgency for it, the need to act before they turned, before it was too late.  Clean, before his father could end it his own way. 

Even if he hadn’t spent the last few years learning when he could to work with wolves instead, he might not have had it in him to be afraid of Peter.  Not even if it would have been smart. 

Instead, he stepped closer.  He couldn’t be sure if he followed instinct, or the memory of what he’d seen in the pond pressed and mingled with what he’d learned about wolves in the last few years, his first lessons on intimacy and scent from Gene.  He took all of it, and stepped right into Peter’s space even when sense said he shouldn’t have. 

His hand cupped warm over the nape of Peter’s neck, squeezing gently as he guided his face into his throat.  “Peter, easy.  Just breathe.”  He was vulnerable, there, fragile in comparison.  If Peter wanted to tear his throat out, he could have done it.  He’d given it right to him.  “Just breathe.  I’m right here; I’m with you.  We have each other now; it’s over.” 

The last part, really, was more for him than Peter, but Peter didn’t know, and it didn’t matter.  It soothed both of them. 

When Peter looked up at him, his breath was still heavy, but his eyes were blue.  His arms came around Chris’ shoulders, holding on with solid strength, keeping him close.  “Determined to keep me human, are you?”

“Only when you need to be.”

Peter’s hands smoothed along his shoulders, down his arms, and back up again.  Scenting him, like he did in leaning in again, nuzzling into his throat.  “I would have come to find you, even if you were a hunter.  You belong to me.”

“I do,” he said, because it was true.  He didn’t correct the rest, even when he wanted to.  There was no past tense; he was what he was.  Peter would have to learn, but he didn’t have to do it right then.   “And I would have come here sooner, if I’d known.  Shit, it’s 46 hours from Maine, I’d have flown if—“

Peter stiffened in his arms, and he knew.  He couldn’t hear anything above them, but still he knew.  His eyes went to his jacket, and his crossbow, but he didn’t go for either.  He had come here to talk; even if Carmen made that difficult, he didn’t want this to devolve into a fight. 

And still, even before his mother and sister had made it down the stairs, Peter stepped in front of him, his eyes gleaming, hand fisting tight in the front of Chris’ shirt and pressing over his heart.  He didn’t need protection.  He hadn’t needed it in the woods and he didn’t need it now, but something new in his chest stirred with warmth at having it.

He didn’t need to be protected, but it was, ultimately, so very human to want to matter enough to be worth protecting.  The high from that alone would be simmering in his veins for a long, long time.   

_ix.iii Beacon Hills, California; the Hale house_

Without Peter, he might have made a better diplomat.  Then again, without Peter, he wouldn’t have stood in the foyer of the Hale house at 4:30 AM, trying his goddamn best to keep everyone from flying off the rails. 

He tried his best; he’d been trying since they stood in the shadow of the shell of the nemeton.  He suggested going back to the house to talk; he gave Peter his jacket to keep him warm against the chill of the October air, not that he needed it.  He ran hot, but he’d taken it, and wrapped it tight around himself even with the butt of the magnum nudging against his ribs.  Carmen had looked at Chris, then, like a scorpion, and that hadn’t changed—trying to calm Peter down when he’d lost his temper and called her out on her secrets had seemed, if anything, to make her look at him with even more disdain. 

He hadn’t gone there to drive a wedge between them; he had never intended to take him, but what could he do?

What the hell could he do?  Peter slipped his hand into his, his chin tipped up like a dog trying to make himself look bigger than he was, too inexperienced to protect his throat.  What could he say, with Peter squeezing his hand and looking up at him like he’d already done enough to deserve devotion. 

_Come on, let’s go.  I want to go._

_Peter—_

_I’m asking you to take me out of here.  I don’t want to be here; I want to go with you._

What the fuck could he say but yes, when he said it like that, with a little shake to his voice even though his skin was flushed with rage?  How could he do anything but be what Peter needed?

_Okay.  Okay, we’ll go.  Get your things; I’ll be outside._

Standing on the porch, he’d already regretted it, but it was too late, then to take it back.  He leaned on the wood railing and smoked, and felt the red of Carmen’s eyes on him for a long moment before she closed the gap, and came to stand beside him. 

“I didn’t come to take him.”  It sounded brittle, even to himself.  “What am I supposed to do?  Tell him I won’t give him what he wants; make him stay?”

“Yes,” she answered, quick, and sharp, and full of hurt.   It bled off of her in waves. 

“He asked me—“

“He’s barely more than a child; he’s 19.  He says things he doesn’t mean.”  19.  Not quite a boy, not quite a man.  He’d been 14, or just past it when the two of them had first spoken.  She’d spent nearly the whole of his teenage years knowing he would, someday, tie himself to an Argent.  She’d had time to dread it, time to plan for it.  Even with her rage, he hadn’t felt any honest hatred toward him, but still he had to wonder if part of her hadn’t hoped for his death, back east.  It might have made her life a little easier, if they’d never met. 

“Well, I don’t,” he said.  His heart beat steady.  “If I tell him he can trust me, that I’ll back him up—I can’t say that and then tell him he has to stay here.”

“And it’s nothing at all to you that it’s convenient for you to separate him from his pack; to get him alone?  You may yet be a good mate to him, but don’t pretend this is all altruism.  You’re getting exactly what you want.”

“I hate to break it to you, but I’ve never in my life gotten exactly what I want.”

The door opened.  Peter’s bag was over his shoulder, hanging heavy.  A boy clung to the side of his jeans, plastered close, pinprick claws digging in.  He was Annie’s age last he’d seen her, maybe.  Maybe younger. 

“Please don’t, Uncle Peter, please don’t—“  Talia was right behind Peter, holding the door for him with her foot, and reaching for the child with the same motion.  Peter beat her to it, lifting him up under his arms to hold tight against his chest.  He nuzzled into Peter’s shirt, burying his face.  The sound Peter made to comfort him was like nothing Chris had ever heard, growing up.  He’d caught it last year, though, and once the year before.  He wondered, sometimes, how much of the soft underbelly of this world his family had missed, looking only for the teeth and blood under the light of the moon. 

Peter’s cheek pressed against the boy’s, his hand rubbed the length of his back.  “It’s alright, Derek.  It’s almost time for you to be in bed.”

Carmen wasn’t wrong, about him.  He was selfish, in the worst way. 

Chris cleared his throat, and tried once more, a paper thin attempt he knew would fail.  “We could stay.  We don’t have to do this; I didn’t plan on leaving.  I came here to stick around.”

Gently, after he’d scented him again, and murmured something into his ear Chris didn’t catch, Peter peeled Derek off of him, and handed him to his sister.  It looked like it hurt, but his eyes when they fell on his mother were cold. 

“We aren’t welcome here.  That’s been made perfectly clear.” 

“You’re always welcome here.  This is your home.”  Carmen said it to Peter, and meant it, Chris knew, but he had to wonder—if she had said it to _him_ , instead, would it have mattered? 

They crossed the county line still in the dark, driving toward the border.  After watching the side of the road in silence, Peter broke it then, with his nails pressed tight into his palms.  What it felt like to him to leave the land where he felt safest and leave his pack with it, Chris could only imagine.  His eyes had been rubbed red at the edges every time he'd glanced over since they left the house.

“Where are we going?”

“Nowhere, yet.  We can figure it out; I just want to get the fuck out.”  To soften it, Chris smiled, though he didn’t feel light enough for it.  “It’s an old story, but I hate California.  Too many bad memories.”

“Yeah.  Yeah, me too.”   He didn’t have to be a wolf to hear the lie, or a parent to catch just how very young he sounded.  Under the light before an underpass, he could see the tattoo on the inside of Peter’s arm, laying against the console.  In the dark, Chris reached over and took his hand. 


	4. IV

_x. marks; Searchlight, Nevada_

Like Chris had, Peter lost his virginity in a motel room. 

If Chris has had had the time and forethought to plan, it might not have been that way—it might, at the very least, have been a nicer room.  The B and V motel was clean, though—fresh sheets; hot water in the sink when he splashed his face with it.  Thick curtains, when he drew them against the midday sun. 

He’d driven well into the morning after leaving the Hale house, and they’d stopped for breakfast somewhere close to noon.  Everything was new, and though there was an awkward edge to certain moments that he couldn’t deny, he could feel the hum and crackle of something growing in the air between the two of them.  A connection stirring to full strength, pressing between them, feeling out its own shape. 

Even with their exhaustion, and the way they’d left Peter’s pack, Chris had known exactly what would happen when they stopped.  He knew it at the diner, in the brush of their hands as he reached over to fill up Peter’s coffee.  He knew it again when he turned from the curtains, and took Peter in, standing near the edges of the lamplight.  The curtains were so thick light barely spilled around them—a narrow strip of it hit the floor, a narrower strip still shining at the bottom of the door. 

He tried, for a minute, to talk about how he had no plans for where they were going, how that was a puzzle they could solve tomorrow.  It was irrelevant, in the moment.  His skin itched; Peter’s did, too.  He could see it in him, even with his tired eyes, and the heaviness that had clung to him since they’d left the preserve. 

Stepping in close to him, the pressure in the air between their bodies felt like a magnetic field.  Chris pushed through it, felt it shape around the two of them like a living thing as he traced the lines on Peter’s arm he’d touched so often on his own—over the laid back ears, down the line of the throat, across the wolf’s belly. 

Peter’s breath hitched as if it was intimate, and that didn’t feel strange.  It had always felt intimate to Chris, even tracing his own.  Though the phantom burn in his arm had faded other times he’d had sex, he never liked it to be touched by anyone but himself. 

When Peter pressed his palm to the wolf’s middle on Chris’ arm, Chris’ eyes closed, a burn settling in and spreading out that didn’t ache.  It went to his spine, through his chest, down to his cock.  It was everywhere, and he pressed forward to feed it back into Peter’s mouth with a kiss so firm it knocked him back against the wall.  His knuckles made contact first, his hand curled around the back of Peter’s head to shield it from bumping as they kissed.  It was too fast for a first kiss, too needy, but he’d waited for it so goddamn long it had felt, suddenly, like he’d die if he didn’t take it. 

Peter didn’t mind.  He pressed forward into him, tugging at his shirt, scratching blunted human nails across his abs.  He tasted like he had by the lake in the vision without the blood and algae and dirt, like cinnamon, heady and warm and tingling on his tongue.  Chris knew he could drown in it, if he let himself; he could do this for hours, with the heat of Peter’s tongue and the nick of his teeth when they went sharp, the hungry little sounds that drifted up from him when Chris pressed tight enough against him that the hard line of his cock nudged against Peter’s. 

“I want to fuck you,” he said, though he should have said it better.  He could have said it better, but he was dizzy with want, and Peter felt improbably small against him for how fiercely he was holding on.  Chris could feel blood welling at his hips, just above his jeans, Peter’s sharpened nails digging in deep. 

He should have said it better, or said more, but Peter shuddered for him anyway, his nod near frantic.  “Please.”

“Have you-“

“No, but don’t let that stop you.”  Peter’s fingers flexed, driving his nails so deep it hurt.  Chris never would have thought, before Peter, that something could sting that much, and feel that good.  A clean pain, bright and sharp and wanted.  “Please; I want you to.  I want to mate with you; I don’t want to wait.  I want to do it now—“

His teeth skimmed along the curve of Chris’ neck, illustrating, biting down soft and licking the barely red skin when Chris held him there.  Even with his body burning with the heat between them there was something so charming about it—the  incongruous sweetness of his tongue when he lapped at Chris like a puppy, maybe, or the strangeness to his human mind of Peter looking to mark him quick like he’d disappear if he didn’t.  He’d carried Peter’s mark from the day he was born; a mating bite would only be an embellishment.

It would be years before he would fully appreciate the significance, though there was never a moment he didn’t wear it proudly.  When he took it, though, it was mostly for Peter’s sake, and done half in ignorance.  He’d learned much, but he didn’t understand quite yet what it meant to a wolf to let them put their teeth to your throat, and know they could kill you, but chose not to—what  it said to other wolves, seeing it. 

_My life is his.  I gave it to him, and I let him keep it.  His life is mine._

Peter’s teeth closed over his throat while they made love for the first time, Chris buried deep inside him, thrusting in shallow punches with Peter’s body still adjusting to taking him in.  He bit deep and quickly, his teeth so sharp that at first, all Chris could feel was the intensity of the pressure.  It was intoxicating. Peter’s body fluttered around him, his hands clawed at his back, teeth clenched tight around his throat, tongue pressed to his skin to catch blood.  It should have been suffocating, the feeling that if Peter could have, he would have drawn him in so close they shared the same skin. 

It should have been, maybe, but for the first time in his memory, he felt needed—not used, and not the promise that he someday would be needed, not a distant flicker of hope.  Peter was warm and real underneath him, affectionate and sharp, growling against his throat and swallowing when Chris bled like he couldn’t get enough of it.  His wolf, brought to life. 

They came down tangled together, still.  There was blood on Peter’s mouth; blood on the sheets.  Chris turned the pillows over and kissed him, more than willing to wait to bandage his throat until they’d both had time to breathe.  The low growl reverberating between them was almost a purr, Peter’s tongue on the mark painfully gentle when he dipped his head to clean it again. 

Chris intended to say that he loved him, then, but murmured only his name instead, unable to imagine a time when he wouldn’t say it like an endearment.  He’d waited too long to be able to name him. 

The soft contentment radiating off his mate and travelling out on the thrum of his growl only paused when his fingers snagged on the scar on the right side of Chris’ ribcage, a thick pucker of burned skin.  Chris’ fingers twitched with the urge to reach over and tug his hand away, but it was already found.  There was no use. 

Despite Chris’ hold, Peter sat up to turn on the light to see better, even for his eyes, and he traced the fleur-de-lis burned into Chris’ skin with a furrow between his eyes that a kiss didn’t smooth. 

“What is that?  It’s like a _brand_ ; did you—“

Firmly, Chris tucked Peter in against his side again, head pillowed on his chest.  It only took a little pressure.  “It’s part of the family crest; we get it when we come of age and forge our first bullets.  It was a long time ago, now.”

A long time ago, and he could remember the scent of his own flesh burning.   The cool California night air; the sound of himself gasping for air, of his father, talking over him. 

_You need a mark to remind you what you are._

Peter’s hand curled over the wound on his throat, cupping it protectively.  The salt on his hand stung, and Chris didn’t say a thing. 

_xi. predators; Sunnyside, Utah_

To hear him bitch you’d think Peter wasn’t the one with a body temperature of a furnace, but the truth was, it was Chris that hated the cold.  It sapped at his bones like it was desperate to suck them out, but he’d keep his mouth shut and hunker down into his jacket. 

Peter gave him a voice—in most things, Peter had enough voice for both of them. 

On Silas’ porch, with its icicles hanging down longer than a man’s arm, Peter wrapped his around Chris’ waist from behind and made his annoyance known, muffled against Chris’ collar. 

“It’s fucking freezing; we’ve been out in it long enough already.  You can smoke in bed.” With as much as he professed to hate it, it was a generous offer, chased with the slight scratch of stubble against the nape of Chris’ neck.  It was too cold for his body to care as much as it wanted to, and still he felt a tug in his balls.    

“He can’t; it isn’t his bed.  He can smoke on the porch like a civilized asshole,” Silas said, her smile in her eyes and her words and her mouth, curving a touch just before she brought her glass to it.  It was Jameson, probably; Chris couldn’t remember.  Unless she was out, they almost always drank Jameson. 

He took his first sip of it on that ratty porch at 18, wide eyed at the strangeness of richer whiskey than he was used to, and drinking with a woman who called herself both a hunter and a druid.  He had never known, as a kid, that there were people like her—people like him.  He wouldn’t know until she told him, on his third visit, that she also wasn’t entirely human.  Her grandmother had a been a dryad, and the woods were in her blood, still, in a way they weren’t in his.

The first time they met, he’d had only the strangeness of her to recommend her—that, and the way she’d looked at him when she said she didn’t invite Argents onto her land, but she’d never seen an Argent who’d have let a coyote go when they realized their snare caught the wrong thing. 

He’d liked being her exception, then; he liked being her friend even more. 

Chris turned enough to kiss Peter, a quick peck that he chased with a second that lingered.  Peter’s mouth was warm, unchapped.  His warm cheek felt good against the frigid tip of his nose; his own Peter scent mingled with sweat and pine and crisp air comforting when he breathed deep.  “Go get in bed and get it warm for me.”

Peter’s eyes rolled quickly, but not too quick to miss.  “Go to bed by myself, and wait for you to come back drunk and tired.”

“I won’t be drunk, and I’m already tired.”  Chris nudged against him, his own rough stubble dragging against Peter’s.  “Go; get some sleep.”

“You’ll be a little drunk,” Peter said, and kissed the corner of his mouth once more, slower still.  “I’ll wait up for you.” 

The screen door creaked, and rattled shut.  Peter’s footsteps took him through the living room, to the back hall of the little house where he passed out of Chris’ hearing.  From her rocking chair, Silas’ boot shifted to nudge his thigh, leaving a wet, muddy spot on his jeans.

“I thought I might have missed you two as newlyweds, but the honeymoon’s not over yet, is it?”

Chris laughed, warm and deep.  His throat ached from the cold.  “Is it ever, for soulmates?  I’ve met a few now that are still fucking ridiculous into their 90’s.”  Ridiculous, maybe, but it gave him hope that the strange, fluttery feeling in his chest when he saw Peter looking at him wouldn’t ever really fade. 

“It always ends—but that doesn’t mean you can’t go again.  It’s up to the two of you to fuel the bond when it doesn’t come as easy.”  Underneath her coat, and her buttoned flannel, and any layers she had underneath, there was a tattoo over her heart of a green grotto, a pale pond, oval edges draped in blooming wisteria that trailed down between her breasts .  He’d seen the tattoo, but never all of it—seen the picture of its twin on her soulmate, killed over 30 years ago, now.  How old Silas was, truly, he couldn’t be sure, but Monica had died an old woman, still active, still hunting. 

It made him think of Peter, but most things did. 

Chris lit his cigarette and pulled hard on it, harder when it hurt his throat.  His nose was running.  “What you said earlier, about word spreading—“  he asked low, as low as he could, knowing Peter was listening even so.

“It’s already spread, Chris.  He’s already here.” 

Chris’ stomach plummeted, more than it should have.  After over two solid years of managing to avoid his father, he’d known that eventually, his luck would run out. 

“Don’t take this the wrong way—I’ve been happy for your help, and you boys are always welcome to visit, but I think you should leave before morning.  Hell, tomorrow at the latest if you need to sleep.  By now Gerard’s heard enough about you two through the grapevine to know the wolf you’re hunting with is your soulmate.  He’s bound to do something stupid.”

Chris’ fingers tightened on the filter of his smoke, half crushing it.  “If he tries anything—“

“You don’t want to start a showdown with him; not out in the wild with a half-finished hunt and God knows how many allies called in to back him.  It’ll be hell for you, and it’s dangerous for Peter.”

“I can take care of Peter.”  His voice rose, and he hadn’t meant for it to.  Without a reprimand, without even a look, Chris bowed his head on his own, and softened it.  “I can take care of Peter, and I don’t leave a hunting partner with a job half done.  We’re staying.”

Silas settled her boots against the railing, jarring it until two icicles fell like spears.  One chipped the wood railing; the other disappeared into the snow banked up against the porch with a soft _whump_.  “Yeah.  I figured you might.  I’ll back you when he finds us; you know that, but don’t say I didn’t warn you when it gets ugly.” 

They talked another hour at least, musing over suspects who might have been breeding the kamaitachi now running wild in the woods, how much they were to blame, whether it was malicious.  Hunts they’d been on since they’d last seen each other; Peter and Monica.  So much of his life always came back to Peter.

In bed in Silas’ back room, Chris made love to Peter even though he was tired, mostly sober, tipsy enough to be demanding with his hands.  Peter was warm and sleepy against him, rocking back on his cock with little pleased, rumbly noises that made Chris crazy.  When he bit down on Peter’s throat his eyes flashed amber in his pleasure, half lidded and still bright.

Before they slept, Chris tried to make him promise, “Stay close to me in the woods on this hunt; I mean it.”

“I’m not afraid of your father, Christopher.”  He said it with sleepy disdain, and Chris was sure he meant it.  If he didn’t, it might have been easier to sleep.  When he did, he was back in the barn in Missouri, and it wasn’t Beau’s body in the hay, but Peter’s.  It had been Peter’s for a long time, now. 

Peter might not be afraid of Gerard, but he was.  He had been all his life, though he’d largely never named it.  It grew under his skin like fungus on the forest floor, a network of tendrils reaching into too many parts of him to ever pull it out.    

Two days later, Gerard caught up to them in a scrubby forest in the dark, on the trail of a kamaitachi that had bled a woman on the way to her daughter’s basketball game.  The cold in his eyes from a good 25 feet away could have stopped Chris’ heart if he let it.  Kate wasn’t with him, and it was for the best.  The way his eyes lingered on the collar of Chris’ coat like he’d heard what was under it was enough. 

“So it’s true.  You’ve taken up with a Hale.”

“Peter.”  Peter still tipped his chin up when he argued, still headstrong and too fearless for his own good.  It was beautiful; sometimes it scared Chris shitless.  “Sorry we didn’t invite you to the wedding.” 

“I wouldn’t have come.  I can imagine my son debasing himself well enough without a visual.”

The vitriol dripped from both of them; for the first time, hearing his wedding mentioned couldn’t take him back with warmth to the Hale house, and the woods behind it.  The beginning of an uneasy truce.  In that moment, his heart was too far into his throat, his hands twitching.  If Peter moved, he had to be ready to try and grab him.  If his father moved—

His magnum was in his coat.  He reminded himself of it, two, three times, again until it became a mantra.

Out loud, he spoke to his father with his jaw tight.  “We’ve got things under control.  If you want to work the same case, go a little further out.  We can tie at least one injury and maybe the death of a child last month up toward West Ridge to these things.”

“You know, I do remember meeting you—“  Gerard’s eyes tracked over Peter like he was looking for cracks, eager for a seam he could pull to expose the wolf.  Chris had seen him do it far too many times.  “You were smaller.  A fast little thing.  Did I nick your tail with that shot or did you yelp because you thought I had?”

When Chris lunged, Peter caught him against his chest, his arm solid and strong against the hammering of his heart.  Whatever he’d smelled like in the moment, fear or rage or both mingled so high they made something new, even after Silas had called on the trees to draw their roots up around the ankles of his father and his men, even after they’d retreated, Peter didn't entirely let him go.

Even when he did, Peter didn’t stop looking at him all night like he might at any moment shake apart into a dozen brittle pieces.  Chris would have been more offended by it if it hadn’t felt so possible. 

The next afternoon, Chris found his father in a bar in East Carbon.  He didn’t carry any weapons; he left Peter at work on traps with Silas, and told them both he was doing research.  Getting thrown out and into the back alley was worth it for the look on his father’s face just after Chris smashed it against the bar, twisting his arm hard around behind his back. 

The electric shock of it was exhilarating.  He knew his own strength against a werewolf, but he’d never known he could be strong enough to make his father bend.  His breath came shaky with it, though his hands were steady.  People around them were yelling; vodka dripped from his father’s knocked glass off the edge of the bar.

“Try and touch him again.  Get within firing range of him, and I won’t hesitate.  I swear to God I won’t—and you know my aim.”

It was worth it, and still, his father’s parting words clung to him like film as he caught his breath on the pavement, an oily puddle seeping under his jacket to stick his shirt to his skin. 

_And you know mine._

He had never left a fellow hunter in the middle of a hunt, not before that one. 

Peter wasn’t happy about it, and Chris was sure he could smell the fear and rage and vodka on him mixed with the scent of his father, but they picked up and drove until he could hold the steering wheel without gripping it so tight the dry skin on his knuckles cracked and bled.  The sound of Peter complaining about it over the rattle of the Range Rover’s aging heater sunk into his chest like morphine, heavy and soothing. 

 

_xii. pressure, Electric City, Washington_

Hunting was always a dangerous profession.  He had known, always, that if his father didn’t take his life in one way or another, the job would.  Retirement had to come young, or it would likely never come at all.  The first time Chris broke a bone he was 8 and training.  He remembered the sudden shock of it, of taking a jump too far and feeling his ankle give.  Over the years, he lost count.  Most of his scars didn’t matter to him; he’d grown up knowing he’d carry them, and more besides, and if he was lucky enough would live long enough to be riddled in them. 

Peter was raised alongside human pack members, but his experience handling the occasional flu or broken wrist hadn’t prepared him for Chris.  

Chris saw it in him in the vision in Moses’ pool, in the way he tended to put himself between Chris and their prey far more often than was strictly necessary.  He saw the pinched look in the corner of his eyes every time Chris bled anyway, and Chris knew long before it happened that a storm was coming, a point where the pressure that had built would have to burst. 

When it did, it was not the first time Peter asked him to take the bite— that was back in the little motel in Searchlight, in the early hours of the morning when they’d stayed a second day because they could, just to revel in each other.  He’d kissed just below the mating bite still angry red on Chris’ neck, and asked, looking up at him with curiosity tinged with hope.

_When things blow over with mom, she’d give you the bite if I asked.  We don’t have to wait until I’m an alpha._

Telling him he didn’t want it, then, had felt like kicking a puppy.  Telling him in the hospital in Washington felt like kicking a hornet’s nest. 

His chest hurt so much the pain of breathing even assisted had been overwhelming.  He had never told Peter, and never would, but the clearest moments from the first two days had come with the sharpness of the pain at the moments Peter stepped away from his bed, his hand no longer holding tight to Chris’ to siphon pain off of him like a drain. 

He was still morphine fuzzy, but he remembered the blurry shape of Peter at the window, how pale he looked in only the light from the half cracked door and the glow of the muted TV.  He remember how softly he’d spoken, too worried to wake him to realize he already had. 

“—no, mom, you don’t understand, this isn’t—he has five broken ribs; he collapsed a lung.  If I hadn’t gotten him here—“  His voice cracked, and Chris hated it.  It was all he could do to have his eyes half open; he couldn’t even twitch a finger.  His chest ached so powerfully it dizzied him.  “I saw it crushing him.  I thought I was going to watch him die; do you have any idea—“

What Carmen had interrupted to say he wasn’t sure, but Peter’s shoulders sagged, his hand half covering his face.  Chris faded, half listening, half gone. 

“He’s asleep; he’s resting.  I’m doing everything I can, but he’s in so much pain—“

“Please.  I’ll send you the address.”

“I’m fine, I’ll be fine as soon as I can get him out of here.  Tell dad I love him, too.”

Peter’s edges blurred, his voice muffled and rising like a radio layered in static.  The sound of him crying after he hung up wrenched at Chris down deeper than his ribs, but his fucking mouth was too weak to work, the mask over his face too heavy.  It felt like an uphill scramble just to keep listening. 

At some point he fell too far back in his consciousness to hear any more, because the next he’d known Peter was back beside his bed, his head bowed, his hand pressed to the bond mark on Chris’ neck.  The black running up his arm was so thick it looked like lace. 

When he woke up properly for the first time since the minotaur they’d been hunting had crushed him into a redwood, the view had barely changed.  Peter was holding his hand, thumb smoothing along the inside of his wrist slow and rhythmic, like the pulse of the pain at a muted throb in his chest. 

He had the strength, then, to squeeze his fingers, and reach up with his right hand to tug down his mask.  “Stop that.  That’s why they’ve got me on the good shit.”  His voice scratched; his mouth felt like cotton and tasted like chemicals. 

When Peter hugged him it hurt even though he was careful, and Chris clutched him closer. 

When he asked, it was after Chris had had water and food, after Carmen and Emmanuel had visited, and Chris had had the chance to see care in their eyes he hadn’t been sure he’d earned.  After the nurses had checked him twice; after the doctor had told him in no uncertain terms that he was lucky to be alive, lucky his husband had been able to get him away from the elk that had attacked him and carry him out of the woods. 

They were alone with the sunset through the windows, red-gold on the end of the bed and the mottled white tiles, catching on Peter’s eyelashes and turning them almost blonde.  His fingers traced the wolf on Chris arm—down its belly, along its chest, through the line of its throat.  He stopped at the eyes. 

“I know you’ve wanted to wait—“

“Peter—“  As rough as his throat was, it was hard to put caution into his voice. 

“But it’s past time for that.  You could have died; the doctor wasn’t exaggerating,”  he whispered, and still there’d been enough strength in him that Chris had let himself be interrupted.  He could do no less, not when he could feel the fear bleeding off Peter like a mist.  “Do you understand how serious that is?  This isn’t you getting bit by a beta out of their mind; this isn’t a broken bone.  It isn’t even a gunshot.  You were nearly crushed to death in front of me—“

“I’m sorry; I know—“

“You don’t!”  He went sharp so sudden, eyes flashing when he looked up.  They had never looked anything other than beautiful on his face—even then, Chris didn’t fear him.  Not for a second.  “You have no idea what I went through.  If that had happened to me, I would have healed in hours.  I had to run to get you to the car, and even getting you here, you could have died before I managed it.  You could have stopped breathing; you could have bled out.  I felt like I was losing my mind.”

In his pause for breath, Chris found his hand, relieved that Peter let him.  It was strong, and warm, soft like only a man who constantly healed could be when Chris brought it to his mouth to kiss the heel of his hand, breathing him in.  Even in the middle of a hospital, to Chris’ human nose he smelled like Peter.  Unbidden, he drew Peter’s hand along the line of his jaw, down his neck, across to the collar of his hospital gown.  Slow and careful scenting, repeated twice until Peter’s fingers curved around the collar of his gown and kept himself in place. 

“I’m still here.  I’m not going anywhere without you—“

“Don’t tell me that if you don’t mean it.  I want you to mean it.”  His eyes were still gold; his skin was as pale as he’d looked when Chris had seen him in his haze.  There were dark circles under his eyes he wouldn’t have thought a werewolf could even have.  “I’ve talked to mom.  As soon as you’re well enough for it, we can go home.  She’d like for us to stay for at least a month while you’re adjusting—“

“No, Peter.”

“—but she thinks the bite will take well—“

“No.”  The softness he said it with couldn’t ease it. 

Peter jerked away from him like he’d been burned, the scrape of his chair against the floor loud and echoing before it tipped all the way over, clattering back.  Chris could see the press of his teeth against his lip, fangs pricking at his mouth. 

“You don’t want the bite?  Fine.  I won’t hunt with you until you take it.”

“You will.”

“I won’t—“

“You will, and you know it.  You’re scared, and I get it—“

“The fuck you do.”  The tears on the edges of his eyes made the gold waver like glitter.  It shouldn’t have been pretty, not with how much it hurt. 

“This isn’t about you.  We’ve talked about this before; I thought you knew that.”  He had, and still he’d known, always, that the storm was coming.  Once, at least, and likely again, and again.  Seasonal, and rolling. 

“No.  I know well enough what it’s about—you’re right, it’s not about me, or us.  It’s your father’s voice in your head and your own stubborn pride.”

A wave of nausea hit his stomach, and Chris squeezed his eyes shut, pinching hard at the bridge of his nose.  He should have said something; he would wish, later, that he’d said something, but he let the quiet stretch too long. 

When he opened his eyes, Peter was gone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, because I am the type of person that would worry about this, don't worry that Peter's /gone/ gone- they're soulmates and they're in love; it's just a fight. He was back within 8 hours to watch over his stubborn human. Why clarify that? Because...I didn't mean for it to be a distressing cliffhanger; it's just where the chapter broke, and I know that some people can get upset about things like that, so. There is angst, here, but I want it to have limits lol


	5. V

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 3 things-
> 
> *This chapter's a bit longer- but I didn't want to cut anything from either of these bits, because they're both important. I did, however, cut another bit that I decided was not critical enough to keep...but I like it, because there's sex and also Chris talking with grandmama Hale (because Talia in my head is always mama Hale, lol), so, it may eventually show up as a oneshot connected to this verse once I polish it up a bit and round it out into a proper oneshot.  
> *There is a little bit of Victoria in this chapter, and she's a little different from show Victoria- her background is different. You'll see what I mean, but basically this is just fair warning that though there is Victoria, she's not quite canon!Victoria.  
> *Yes, the amount of chapters is still changing- but the end of the story still hasn't changed. 
> 
> 4th, bonus thing
> 
> *You guys are all amazing and I appreciate your support for this story so very much.

_xiii. healing; Beacon Hills, California; the Hale house_

For the first hunt after Washington, Chris tried his best to make it easy—so much so that there were signs he saw, and skipped, because if he was right about what was happening, it would have been a challenge.  Neither of them were ready for a challenge. 

Chris had agreed they should move into the pack house while he healed, but even there Peter had barely settled.  He slept badly; Chris woke up half the time to find himself watched, and didn’t dare comment on it.  Peter hadn’t been wrong, exactly—he worried for Peter in a dozen different directions, but at that point in their life together he’d never seen anything take Peter down that he didn’t get right back up.  The dreams he had about the barn cut him as deep as they always had, but he couldn’t say that he could fully imagine, yet, what Peter had been through; he didn’t want to.  Every time he woke up from his nightmare, it was easy to reassure himself Peter was whole and safe, as easy as pressing a hand to his chest and feeling him breathe. 

His own breath still came heavy, his chest marred with a hole near his left shoulder and another further down toward his ribs on the right side where the minotaur’s horns had dug in.  Peter’s nightmare had already happened; he could open his eyes and see the proof of it.  It was no wonder he wasn’t sleeping.  In his place, Chris wouldn’t have, either. 

They hadn’t fought about the bite again since the hospital, and still there was a tension between them that hadn’t been so keenly felt before, strung tight like a trip wire.  In the quiet at night, when he woke up to Peter staring, he could feel it humming in the air like a plucked string. 

Rather than acknowledge it, Chris kept his mouth shut, and let Peter hover.  It wasn’t so hard to muffle it with a kiss, to tug the quilt Peter’s grandmother had made for him up tighter around the two of them and hide his face against Peter’s throat.  When he could feel Chris breathing against his skin, eventually, he would sleep. 

He let Peter hunt for them, even when he didn’t really want venison.  Going down to breakfast he wore the pajama pants Peter had long ago stolen from him and worn until they held his scent; he wore Peter’s shirts lounging on the couch.  When he insisted on wrapping Chris’ chest a full week past the earliest the doctors had said he could stop, Chris let him.  It made him stir crazy, but if he couldn’t give Peter what he wanted, letting him soothe his instincts was the least he could do. 

After a solid three months he had thought they were ready for something close to home, a witch just outside of Beacon Hills who’d killed at least two by his own count, gearing up for a larger sacrifice.  He knew how to handle witches gone bad, and she didn’t seem too powerful.  She could shape shift, but if she was half as dangerous as some of the other magic users they’d faced, she would have been twice as subtle, and causing a hell of a lot more fuss. 

They seemed ready.  Peter took the afternoon before they went out to shift and go for a run, but he’d come to Chris so easily when he’d stood behind the Hale house and mimicked a howl to call him that it made his heart hurt.  He loved every inch of Peter, every shape of him, but it was so easy to love him when it wasn’t complicated, when he ran to Chris and barreled into his chest like a pup, like they’d been separated days instead of hours. 

They were as ready as Chris thought they were going to be, then, and still, by his own measure the first hunt back was a disaster. 

They caught up to the witch shape shifted into a diatryma, and it should have been open and shut.  She was a murderer; she was a monster by her actions rather than the magic in her blood, and Chris would have had no trouble putting her down.  He’d barely raised his gun when she caught sight of him through the trees—it wouldn’t have mattered; he had time to pull the trigger, but Peter never gave him the chance. 

The snarl out of Peter’s chest wasn’t just inhuman; it didn’t even sound like his body should have been able to hold it.  His wolf was bigger than it had been when they met, filled out in the shoulders with a thick ruff of fur and a little more length to his legs.  He was strong, and dangerous to his prey, but it was the first time Chris had ever seen him charge anything with such utterly chilling ferocity. 

In the form of prehistoric bird she’d taken, her beak was sharp and enormous, her claws strong and quick, and none of it mattered.  The first bite after Peter lunged snapped her neck and opened it; a quick sharp jerk that sent blood spraying out onto the nearest oak and down his chin.  In the dark it was black and thick, cascading down her feathers before she reverted to human form, down the pale skin of her chest and across the talisman she wore once she had. 

She was covered in it; her chest was still.  It was over, and arguably already overkill, and Peter didn’t stop.  His roar was savage, his teeth brutal in ripping out her throat down to the bone.  Around the snap of his mouth Chris could see the white of her spine catching the moonlight, jaggedly broken, wet and glistening.  His claws raked across her stomach; a sharp shake of his head and hers had separated from her body entirely.

The last time he’d seen a wolf so brutal and wild, he’d been hunting them.  Years ago, it might have turned his stomach.  There might have even been a point in his life it would have made him nervous, but he wasn’t so sure.  Even as a boy who’d been taught he shouldn’t, he’d loved his wolf before he met him, been sure he could trust him.  The myth of the rabid dog had never taken hold.  Lycanthropy was a transformation, not a disease.  Watching Peter lose himself in a kill wasn’t frightening—he wasn’t driven by madness, only pain, fear, and instinct.  Like he’d told Chris the night they met, the wolf was only an amplifier.  He was Peter, turned up to 11.

No matter the form, there was no instinct deeper, no emotion stronger than the pull toward his mate.   

Slowly, Chris approached him until he was close enough to stand on ground where her blood had already begun to soak into the earth, feeding the undergrowth.  He dropped into a crouch, and didn’t touch.  He was Peter’s soulmate, and his anchor, but a wolf riled to a certain extent could bite even himself and not know it, not at first.  A quick tag wouldn’t have troubled him, but Peter would never forgive himself. 

He called to him, instead, low and under his breath.  He only had to do it twice. 

Peter had been disarticulating her shoulder; her arm was nearly removed.  In the shake of the thick coat down the line of his shoulders, Chris could see that he was trembling. 

“It’s alright.  It’s alright, Peter,”  he murmured.  The hand he laid against Peter’s spine was careful, though he didn’t have to be.  He turned to meet Chris almost immediately, the growl shifting to a whine he recognized that was both welcome and worry.  His muzzle shoved into Chris’ neck, smearing it with blood.  The scent of it on the air was nearly overpowering; metal and salt and something rich but off, like incense gone rancid.  Chris scratched deep behind Peter’s ears, firm and comforting, and breathed through his mouth to cut the smell.  “I’m right here, baby; I’ve got you.  You did good.  You did good, baby.  I’m okay.  We’re okay.”

The whining didn’t stop.  Peter’s tongue flicked out, dragging in long, wet strokes across the bond mark on his neck, and the scar just below his shoulder.  It was still pink and angry, the skin still puckered.  Peter licked it until Chris had to nudge him away, just barely; his tongue started to feel like sandpaper if he licked the same spot enough.  If he’d looked, he knew there would be blood and foam on his skin from the witch, blood seeping into his shirt. 

Chris caught his muzzle, and kissed the bridge of his nose, firm and long.  His fur felt wet; it should have disgusted him more than it did. 

“I’m sorry, baby.  It was too soon.  It’s my fault; it was too soon.  Why don’t we go home, okay?  Let me take you home.” 

Away from the full moon, even a house of werewolves was quiet in the middle of the night.  They came in carefully, kept the lights out.  Peter led him down the hall, though they’d been there long enough by then that Chris really didn’t need it.  He hadn’t heard himself call this place home in the woods, and if he’d heard Peter say it he’d have felt the need to add _for now_ , but without his knowing, it had already become true. 

Peter didn’t shift back until they were in the bathroom, and Chris was turning the shower on hot.  It steamed the air, and he left the vent off and let it fill the room until the air was misty and heavy.  Chris stripped, and left his clothes on the floor, uncaring.  They got in together.

Peter cupped his hands and rinsed his mouth though the water was hot, spit it out to spiral toward the drain until it ran pink, then clear.  From behind, Chris’ arms wrapped tight around his waist, his lips pressed to his shoulder. 

Peter had been quiet almost long enough to worry him, and when he spoke the water almost buried it. 

“I’m not sorry.  If you want to do this, this is how it’s going to be sometimes.  If you want to risk your life I can’t stop you, but I can stop _them_.”

“I didn’t ask you to be sorry.”  Chris’ arms tightened when Peter inhaled, too sharp.  “I didn’t.”

“You would have shot her.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sorry I killed her.  One of us was going to, and I’ve done it before—“

“Yeah.  But not like this.”

Peter leaned against the tile, water streaming down his arms, running past Chris’ chin where it pressed against his skin.  Peter’s jaw was clenched tight, like the shock running through him was shameful.  Like he had in the woods, Chris could feel him trembling against his chest, a mix of adrenaline and worry and the peculiar heady sickness that violence carried.  There was a high to it, and a swooping nausea.  Chris knew both. 

“I’m _not_ sorry.  I’d do it again.   She wanted to kill you; I could smell it on her.  It made me feel crazy—“

Chris closed his teeth over Peter’s neck where his bond mark would have been, if Chris was a wolf, and could give it to him.  He bit him there often when they had sex, in the mornings when he was sleepy—times like that one, when his mind ran away with him. 

With Peter fallen quiet, he flexed his jaw, and let go, nuzzling his beard over the quickly fading imprint of his teeth.  “You aren’t crazy—but that doesn’t mean you have to feel fine about it.”

Peter would have denied it; he could see him opening his mouth to do it, but Chris licked his neck, cutting him off. 

“Come on; let’s clean up.  I want to go to bed.” 

In their bed, in a room that used to be Peter’s, he spread his legs for Peter, and wondered like he had before how many times Peter had laid awake in that bed as a boy imagining something like this—his mate willing and warm underneath him, the sheets full of the scent of sex and of the two of them together, so intertwined it became another scent altogether. 

The whine Peter gave against his throat when Chris came on his cock was so like the wolf that Chris clutched harder at his back, half sure for a moment he’d started to shift.  It was strange to think, but he’d have been no less willing to hold Peter to him, no less eager. 

Whether it was Peter or his wolf, only the shape changed.  The love never did. 

 

_xiv. contingency;  Newport, Rhode Island - > _ _Wheeling, West Virginia_

Of all the dozens of large events that shaped the course of Chris’ life, a few stood larger than others.  The tattoo at his birth; leaving his family.  Meeting Peter.  A missed call at a 7-11 in Newport, Rhode Island; a call back that changed everything. 

The hunt that had brought them there had finished over a week before; they’d stayed for a little downtime.  It wasn’t often they had a chance to be normal citizens, let alone tourists.  Peter had taken a picture of the two of them at the Newport Tower with the digital camera Chris had gotten him for his last birthday.  A few weeks after the trip was over, he’d remembered to print it. 

Peter might tease at him for being sensitive, sometimes, but he was a romantic himself, under the sharp edges, like sweetness cut with acid to make it richer on the tongue. 

Chris had left his phone in the car.  It wasn’t the sort of thing he would have done a few years ago but then, he’d begun to transform in those years.  His contacts increasingly became his and Peter’s contacts; it didn’t matter, really, which of them answered the phone.  Anyone who would have been put off by talking with Peter instead of him wasn’t a contact worth keeping.  There weren’t any messages he’d be getting that he’d need to hide; there were parts of his past he’d never spoken about and likely never would, but they didn’t have active secrets, and he couldn’t imagine his parents or Kate using that number—even finding that number.  He very rarely, now, talked to the sort of hunters who were on speaking terms with his branch of the family. 

He came back with a Coke for himself, bottled water and a milkshake for Peter.  Growing up rich, he’d developed a taste for finer things, but living most of the year on the road with Chris from the time he was 19 had started to bring him down to earth a bit- not that he’d ever admit it, or ask for it.  He didn’t have to.  The way his eyes lit up like a kid when Chris brought him ice cream was enough. 

They still did, then, but he was distracted even as he took it, tapping the edge of Chris’ Razr absently against his knee.  Curiosity in his eyes could burn just as bright as appreciation.  “Who’s Victoria?”

Recognition jolted through Chris’ throat, and still, in the moment, he hadn’t expected she’d called.  A text, maybe, to tell him Kate was dead.  His father was a too solid a constant.  He raised his eyebrows, and traded Peter’s overpriced water for his phone.  “Hm?”

“Victoria,” he said, drawing out the syllables, as if it mattered, as if he was jealous, but only for show.  Chris couldn’t feel any heat behind it, and there was no reason for there to be.  Peter was with him almost all the time; their bond was strong.  He didn’t have any competition.  He never really had, and he never would.  “She called while you were inside; who is she?”

“What did she want?”

“I didn’t answer—and neither did you.”

Chris rubbed his phone’s outer screen on his pants, buffering off their fingerprints.  “There was a point we were close when we were kids.  It was a long time ago; even when I met you it was a long time ago.  She changed; I did too, we just—“ Chris’ mouth lifted into something that wasn’t quite a smile.  For half a minute he was back in the summer both their families had worked just outside of Chattanooga, the memory of Nickajack Lake flashing so sharp and clear behind his eyes he could almost hear Kate and Victoria laughing.  “—changed into very different people.  She used to still call me if she had a tough hunt, but that hasn’t happened for a long time now.  We got in a fight, a few years ago.  It was a long time coming.”

Peter leaned back against the door, appraising.  “Was _I_ the fight?”  Even with the lilt of teasing to it, Chris knew that if he said yes, Peter would feel something about it.  He might not show it, not outright, but Chris would feel a flicker of it, and know.  The bond wasn’t quite what novels made it out to be, but it wasn’t nonexistent, either.  The longer they spent together, the more he could feel Peter under his skin, like shadows overlapping. 

Chris shook his head, and didn’t even have to lie.  “No, not really.  It was before we met.  We ended up on opposite sides of a hunt; I helped out a pack who’d made a few mistakes.  She said I wasn’t a hunter anymore; I told her she was stuck in a cult—you can argue I was honest, but we were both assholes.”

“You can be,” Peter said, and sipped his shake.  Unconcerned, accepting.  “And yet she’s still important enough to have an A in front of her name, keeping her at the top.”

“Wrong.”  Peter’s instincts were good, usually; it was a bit of a kick to needle him for missing, even if only a little.  “She has an A in front of her name because she’s an Argent.  My cousin.”

“Usually people do that the other way around.”

Chris held his hand up, and dialed.  He could remember the sound of it; the brightness of the summer sun outside.  There was a navy blue mustang parked next to the dumpster he could see through the front windshield, a girl in jean shorts on a towel on her knees on the hot hood fiddling with the wiper blades.  Flashbulb memory of those seconds before the phone picked up, seared in place by what came after. 

“Chris?”

“Who’s dead?” he said, colder than he meant to be, colder than he wished later he would have been.  He could have said hello, first.  He could have said he was sorry, not for making the choices he had, but that it had driven so much space between them.   He could have told her, then, there was a time when she was the only part of his family he’d had hope for, after he lost it for his sister. 

He could have told her that if she gave him half a reason, any reason at all, he’d have hope for her again. 

“This isn’t that kind of phone call,” she said. 

Chris leaned back in his seat, thumb tapping against the steering wheel.  “It’s been a long time since you called for my help.  If you’re doing it now, you must have a hell of a problem.”

“I do.”  Her voice wavered, and it was then he knew something about this was different; something wasn’t right.  He’d watched her cut her palm open, once, when they were trying to throw knives, and she hadn’t even cried.  She’d barely huffed, like it inconvenienced her.  “Please just listen.  Before you hang up, will you listen?”

“Yes.”  The pit in his stomach felt cold as ice, and just as slick. 

“Where are you?”

“Newport, Rhode Island.  We aren’t working; we haven’t had a trip that wasn’t work in—“

“10 months.”  Peter helped, and Chris half waved him off, but let his hand come to rest on Peter’s thigh. 

“Almost a year.  Seemed time for a vacation.” 

“I’m in Wheeling, West Virginia.  That’s about a day’s drive, isn’t it?”

Chris nodded, counting, considering based on what he knew, where he’d been.  Relative distances, possible routes.  “A little less, if we haul ass, but I’ll need to know what we’re getting into if we do.” 

“I’m not asking you here to hunt—would you shut up and just—listen?”

From his seat, Peter huffed a laugh against his straw.  Chris squeezed his thigh.

“Yeah, I’m listening.”

At first, there was only silence; so much of it he’d have wondered if she hung up if he couldn’t hear the barely wet sound of her breathing.  “I made a mistake.  I didn’t realize there was an alpha here- I thought the wolf I was tracking was an omega.  I didn’t know there was another until it was too late- and I still took care of it.  She’s dead, but either the myth about killing the one who bit you is bullshit or there’s more to it, because it’s still happening.  I can feel it happening.”  The strain in her voice had tightened; he could almost see her face.  She was pissed at herself for failing, for missing something, even if there had been few clues to miss.  She would be exactly the type to die mad rather than frightened, but not mad enough to live.

Chris could hear the blood in his own ears; the white noise of the phone.  “We’ll help you.  Peter and I—we’ll come get you; we’ll spend the full moon with you there and then we’ll take you home.”  It barely registered for him, then, that he’d started to actively call the Hale house home.  He wasn’t sure when it had happened, couldn’t have drawn a clear line between the time after the accident almost two years ago and then, but he knew it wasn’t the first time.  “It doesn’t have to be like this; Carmen can help you—“

“I can do what I need to do; I’m not asking for you to-“

“You don’t have to ask; I’m telling you not to be a goddamn idiot—“  Chris’ voice rose; his heart rate with it.  His hand pulled away from Peter.  “It’s archaic; it’s asinine, your life isn’t over.“  He could feel Peter’s tension along his side like a palpable thing, pressing out, filling the car. 

“It is.  We’re not arguing over that—I didn’t call so you could pitch his pack to me.  There’s something more important.”  He wasn’t proud of it, later, but the impulse snatched him for a moment that he could have said he didn’t want her to call just to say goodbye.  He could have hung up, and Peter would have let him cry on his shoulder, and not called him out for being an ass. 

“If you want me to tell Kate for you, that’s a lost cause; we haven’t talked since she was 17.”

“I had a baby, 6 months ago.  A daughter.”  Even with the waver to her voice, even with the pain, and the anger, Chris could hear her smile on the last word.  The Argents had always talked about their daughters like a king talked about his sons—the next line of defense; new generals. 

All Chris could see at first was what they had been, Victoria and Kate both, and what they became.  His mother rubbing his back when she caught him throwing up out back after a hunt. 

_It’ll get easier, Christopher.  It’s in your blood._

Born leaders they may have been, but how they _could_ have led and how they were taught to lead were worlds apart, a channel so wide they never looked the same on the other side.  It made him wonder if he would have recognized his father, as a boy, if he crossed through the same wilderness in the middle, or if he was an anomaly.  If any one of them had been born to violence and cruelty, he’d have believed it of Gerard. 

“No.”  His voice sounded stronger coming out of the brief quiet, maybe, or he’d really managed to put enough force behind it to carry.  In his memory, it was loud in the car, solid.  “No, you don’t get to check out.  Are you out of your mind?  You have a _child_ , Victoria— Jesus Christ; she’s just a baby—“

“Which is why it’ll be easier for her to adjust—if you get here as fast as you can, and take her now, before anyone else can show up.”  There, her voice cracked properly, so sharply that for a moment, Chris could hear her gasping for air like there wasn’t enough in the room.  “Don’t you dare tell me I haven’t thought about it; I’ve spent all week thinking about it while this _virus_ gets stronger and stronger.  I can’t fight it much longer, but I’ve had enough time to get everything ready for you.  It’s all here; I have papers putting you down as her father—“

“You’ve had a week, and this is your plan?  You don’t think about how the fuck you could live; you—no, this is crazy.  It’s crazy; you won’t stay alive for her because of what you’re becoming—and you want me and Peter to come get her?  You know that’s what it’ll be, don’t you?  It’s me and him, together, there’s no other option—“  Peter caught his hand out of the air mid-gesture, fingers curling to weave through Chris’, though he barely felt them.  He felt, oddly, only half connected to his skin.  His heart was beating too fast. 

“You’re right; there isn’t.  And yes, it sounds insane—it sounds insane to me.  I hate him.  I don’t trust him.  I think you’ve made a mistake—but you don’t, and that’s why I need you.  Because _you_ don’t think you’ve made a mistake.  You’ve made it work; you’ve survived.  I want her to survive, and that isn’t something I can teach her.  Not with what she’ll face—it’s barely in, but I can see the shape on her mark.  I saw it right after she was born.”  The bitterness in Victoria was so pervasive he could almost taste it, layered against an exhaustion so thick he could feel its drag against his own bones.  “The details will come in when she’s older, but the shape you can’t miss.  It’s an anchor.” 

From her mouth, it carried the same weight of _it’s poison_.  Chris wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference, with just the tone. 

“If she was anyone else’s daughter, I’d say it could mean anything, but she isn’t, and the shape behind it looks light enough to be the moon.  It won’t be long before it’s blatant; I know.  I know what she’s likely to be exposed to in this family; I know what it has to mean—and I know what your father did to you.”

Chris could feel Peter’s eyes on him, like a hunting dog, drawn to the scent of old prey.  For as little as he talked about his father, and the disastrous single meeting they’d had, he knew Peter’s imagination was good enough to fill in the broad strokes, but not the details.  He could guess, but he couldn’t be certain, not without Chris saying more than he wanted to.  There was no point, not when knowing too much of the truth might tempt Peter to go after him. 

Chris leaned forward, his head bowed against the steering wheel.  The phone was heavy; Peter’s gaze was heavy.  The sound of Victoria crying and trying to stifle it on the other end of the line wrapped around his throat like a snare, silencing his protests. 

“Chris, please.  I haven’t asked you for anything in a long time.  I don’t trust her with them.  I don’t know that I would have trusted myself, but I love her.  I do.”

His jaw unhinged; the force of it hurt.  “Then do the harder thing, and be her mother.  Let us help you.  If you want to ask me for help, let it be that.”

“I want your help.  Just tell me you’ll keep her safe.”

“Goddammit, Victoria—“

“Promise me—“

“Send me the address,” he spit it out, sharp and brittle.  “And _wait_ until we can talk to you.”

“Thank you.  I knew you would.”  Her relief was too strong.  There was no pretending.  He knew what they would find in West Virginia, and still he couldn’t let it in.

“Send me the address,” he said, and it was softer, but not the last words he would have chosen.  If he had let it in, he might have chosen differently. 

Chris snapped the phone closed, and threw it so hard against the console he was sure for a horrified minute he’d broken it, but the thing was a tank.  The metal was chipped; the dash scuffed.  Peter took the phone and got it out of sight, his hand rubbing warm down the line of Chris’ spine where he bent again over the wheel, his eyes squeezed closed. 

The snare was back around his throat, strangling him. 

_She’s going to kill herself.  With her own child in the house; she’s going to kill herself and we aren’t close enough to stop it._

_I didn’t think I cared about her anymore.  I thought we were finished.  I thought every piece of good in her was gone._

_I hate my fucking family._

His mouth hung just barely open, none of it said.  Peter squeezed at the back of his neck, warm and firm like Chris did for him when he was spiraling on a full moon. 

“Get out; let me drive.”

There was part of him that would always care about Victoria, part of him that would always care about Kate even when he hated her, but it was Peter that had taught him everything he knew about love.  He had learned from the Hales, presumably—though Chris would like to think that some of it they picked up together, knowledge gained through practice, shared experience.

It was good to hear it said, sure, but it wasn’t always the words he needed.  That afternoon, if he’d had reason to sit down and be sappy about it, he’d have said love was looking at Peter with his head thrown back laughing in the sun and feeling the same kick in his stomach now that he was almost 25 that he had when Peter was 19.  Peter leaning on his back and reading over his shoulder while Chris read every single historical marker at the Newport Tower, all over each other even in the summer heat. 

It wouldn’t have been inaccurate; love was in the everyday, in affection made ordinary but not taken for granted. 

Love was, also, driving like a bat out of hell straight to someone he’d been taught to hate and fear, someone who’d have killed Peter and likely at least half his family without a second thought.  Breaking the speed limit like it mattered to give the illusion that it did, that in some world, they might make it there in time to change her mind.  Knowing the truth, and holding it in. 

He hated to credit his father with knowing a goddamn thing, but like Gerard had said, some things were more important than the truth.  

A half hour out, Chris called Victoria three times.  She never answered, and the sick feeling that he’d done nothing by trying to get her to other than tipping her off rose in his gut. 

The house had a gravel drive.  It jarred the car; the rattle of it hid the crying to his human ears until he got out, but he could hear her then even through the front door—a baby screaming, high and sharp, muffled with distance.  He’d barely started to move toward it when Peter caught him, his arms vise tight around his waist. 

“Chris—“

“The baby’s crying; we have to—“

“You have to let me go in first—“

“No way in hell; she’s never met you—“

“There’s too much blood.”  The hitch in Peter’s breath wasn’t for Victoria.  Chris didn’t have to feel the tears wetting his own cheeks to know that; he was too numb to notice them.  He’d been crying since the third phone call, maybe; maybe since they turned onto the gravel.  Maybe it had started sooner, a hundred miles out while he’d talked to Peter about the summer he remembered, the light on Nickajack lake and the cave that was flooded, the two of them daring each other to brave its depths.  His breath rasped in his chest, heavy and hard.  “I’m sorry.  I’m sorry; I can smell it—it’s too much blood.  It’s too much.  You have to let me go in first.  Please, Chris.  It won’t hurt me.” 

It wouldn’t, he knew.  It wouldn’t matter to Peter to find her with her brains blown out, her wrists slit, a knife through her heart.  She was a hunter, and a stranger.  She’d never been his family. 

Rather than keep struggling, the intensity shifted.  His body twisted away from the farmhouse he suddenly couldn’t bear to look at, his hands clutching into Peter’s shirt as he turned to press his face into his neck.  The baby was further, but her crying seemed louder than his own, muffled against the curve of Peter’s throat, the collar of his shirt. 

“Fuck.  _Fuck_ ; I can’t believe—“  But he could, he could, and he couldn’t finish the lie. 

Even with the crying and the scent of blood that had to be strong enough to gag him, Peter would have held him until he stopped shaking; Chris didn’t doubt it for a second. 

The baby was still crying, though, and Chris couldn’t wait that long.  He felt like he’d be shaking for days.  As soon as he could bear to push Peter away he did, though he did it weak, and his breath stayed shallow.  His eyes closed. 

“Yeah, alright.  I’ll stay here.  Just bring me the baby.”

The door creaked; the crying was louder.  There must have been carpet; he couldn’t hear footsteps, at first, and his mind drifted, unmoored.  It was near midnight.  There were no street lights, out this far.  If he opened his eyes and looked straight up, he’d see stars for miles. 

Before he knew it, before his breathing had even begun to even, the crying was closer, and Peter was pressing the baby against his chest, warm and small and still wailing. 

“Take her.  If you go in, don’t go further than the kitchen right now.”

It was there, on the sanded wood table, that he found a folder full of documents, and a note on top of it, written in Victoria’s easy cursive. 

_Her name is Allison._

_You survived, Chris.  Teach her how you did it._

_Tell her I loved her._


	6. VI

_xv. timing; Beacon Hills, California, the Hale house_

Before Allison, Chris had never really known what to do with babies.  Children were far easier, though with few exceptions he tended to like them more than they liked him.  Then again, that likely had a great deal to do with the children he was around—to hunter’s children, he was a man who didn’t quite play by the same rules as their parents, with a wolf on his arm and maybe even right beside him.  For pack children, even those of packs he helped, he was still something out of a nightmare that smelled of wolfsbane and gunpowder and blood, still a reason for older siblings to push the little ones behind them and square their shoulders.  In both cases, he wasn’t exactly the kind of visitor parents encouraged their children to play with. 

Peter, on the other hand, had been raised in and around siblings and cousins and visiting packs too numerous to count.  He knew exactly what to do with babies—how to hold them, how to quiet them, how to get the bottle in their little angry mouth when they were hungry but too fussy to hush long enough to eat. 

After they buried Victoria on the land outside the farmhouse in West Virginia, Chris had wondered for maybe half a minute if Allison was something they might fight about.  They’d never talked about having children; it had never even come up.  Maybe that in itself should have been strange, but they were on the road most of the year, and it had never seemed pressing.  Whether Peter had thought about it in those years or before them he couldn’t say, though it had crossed Chris’ mind more than once how close Peter was to Derek, how well he played with the children even on the full moon. 

It had never seemed pressing, but Chris had thought about it—and every time he did, he’d thought about his father, and just how much he didn’t have the first idea of how to be one.  When they were married in the woods behind the house, from an upstairs balcony he’d seen Emmanuel walking with Peter before the ceremony, the easy fluidity in him when he snagged his arm around Peter’s neck and kissed his cheeks, then his forehead.  He had held onto him even after like it was easy, like his son was still little, like he hadn’t run away with a hunter the year before—or like it didn’t matter that he had.  There was a depth of grace and adoration between the two of them that Chris felt too outside of to even begin to comprehend, so strong he’d had to look away. 

Peter left his pack, fell in love with a monster, asked to marry him in the backyard on ground that was all but holy to his family, and they’d opened the doors wide to let him.  Peter had complained right and left that they hadn’t been welcoming enough, that they treated Chris like a pariah, but to Chris’ eyes there hadn’t been a moment of hesitation much less rejection.  They were stiff with him, sure, but no one treated him with anything but respect; no one left the room when Peter kissed him before he gave Chris his coffee. 

To see such shocking kindness layered against Peter’s expectation that it was the least they could do had told him enough about the gulf between their childhoods to know that Peter wasn’t just the only one of them who’d know what it took to be a father, it would likely be nearly incomprehensible to him how little Chris knew.  Chris only knew what not to do—held up against the example Peter had grown up with, that level of experience seemed dauntingly bleak. 

When he thought about having a family with Peter, he couldn’t help but think about that—Gerard and Emmanuel, Peter’s strong family ties that held him up, and his own family he’d done everything he could to cut himself free from, like heavy canvas in water, dragging him down. 

He would never be ready, he was sure, not to Peter’s standards, so he never brought it up—until they were standing over Victoria’s grave, their hands dirty, summer sun beating down and Allison on a blanket in the grass, an umbrella up to give her shade.  She’d teethed through the digging of her mother’s grave, and fallen asleep when they buried her. 

For the moment right before he raised the topic of a child he’d never asked for and already wanted, he had no idea what Peter was going to say.  They were on new ground. 

“We can’t let her end up with my father,” he said, his skin crawling.  He scratched at the dirt and sweat over his tattoo, and still felt it, like ants in his veins.  “If nothing else, we can take her with us, and Talia—“

He had barely gotten that much out when Peter interrupted, easy, like he didn’t even have to think.  Like he’d already decided.  “Of course we’re taking her with us.  You promised.  Besides, it’s clear a pack is what she needs.” 

Victoria hadn’t been wrong; the anchor on her stomach was unmistakable.  Navy blue, against a circle of white that looked like it might well glow in the right light someday.  It’d be a beautiful mark; he wanted her to live long enough to be proud of it, to never be told she shouldn’t be.  At the grave with Allison asleep on a blanket in the grass, and Peter having already handled this mess better than Chris would have ever thought, he wanted more than he let himself ask for.  Even then, even with Peter’s easy acceptance, it didn’t seem the right time. 

Not at their little funeral, not in the car or any of the hotels on their slow way back to California.  There were hours spent in learning on that trip—learning to feed her, to walk her and rock her when she cried.  Changing diapers, arguing with desk staff because the mini fridge in their room wasn’t working and they had to ice her teething ring.  Giving up, and filling a bucket with ice to chill it down. 

For the first three months back home, it was never the right time, either.   She was consuming, and it was easier for Chris to lose himself in her than to think properly about the future.  In hindsight, what he’d been waiting for in those first few months was for Peter to find him unsuitable and agree that Talia should raise her—but that confrontation had never come.  Watching Chris with her never brought any concern to his face when Chris looked back at him, only a particular softness at the corners of his eyes that Chris hadn’t seen before.  He could understand that.  Watching Peter with her made him feel something new, too, something different than he had watching him tumble in the grass with Derek, or letting Cora help him with a late night snack on a full moon.

Peter talked to Allison like she was an adult, always, even in those earliest months, even when she’d not yet spoken a word.  On a warm night in October, Chris caught him with her on the front porch with the moon a sliver above the trees, Allison held against his side.  One hand cradled the back of her head, the other pointed up, guiding her to look toward the dim light of the moon.

“Do you see?  The moonlight’s coming back; everyone who doesn’t feel the moon in their blood thinks it’s the worst for us at the full moon, but I hate it when I can’t feel it at all.  I hate the stillness.  It’s better like this—and I love this moon more than all the others.  It’s the hunter’s moon—Talia and Brandon used to try to scare me with that when we were kids, and I used to do it to Derek and Laura, but I love it now.”  He nuzzled against her cheek, scenting her.  From his perch at the window he’d opened to smoke, Chris didn’t dare to breathe.  “I met your daddy on that full moon; has he told you about that?  No?  He thinks you’re too young for stories, doesn’t he?  I’ll tell you all about it.”

Her hand flailed, catching on Peter’s shirt.  He kissed her forehead, and held her closer. 

“Once upon a time, there was a very brave, and very foolish hunter, who was desperate enough to meet his soulmate to offer his blood to fairies—and fairies are always dangerous; they almost always take more than you know.  Love makes anyone stupid; love makes reckless people dangerously stupid—you’ll have to be smarter, little imp, but you have me for that.”

Chris should have joined them, but he couldn’t bear to interrupt, even with the longing in his chest for both of them so strong it burned.  This was their moment, and it wasn’t time for he and Peter to talk—or it was, and had been for weeks, and he’d only fallen back on his old habits of holding the most important words in his throat, keeping them safe rather than letting them out. 

He put the lighter in his pocket, and threw the cigarette into the trash by their bed unsmoked.  It was the last he touched for years, and though Peter groused that _he_ had never been enough to make him stop but Allison had managed it without saying a word, Chris knew he was pleased. 

It was Allison that made him decide to be a little more careful with himself, but it was more, too—it was her and everything she brought with her, a shift in their lives down to the deepest foundations.  Peter’s eyes were still gold, then, but in taking her in, they’d started their pack already.  They just hadn’t known it yet.

The deep burn of longing in Chris’ chest hadn’t stopped when he stepped away from the window, and it didn’t even after he’d gotten back in bed.  It lingered when Peter came back from telling their story to a baby that was never meant to be theirs until she settled and fell asleep, and after Peter fell asleep himself.  Chris could feel it smoldering, deep and ceaseless, like a hunger he’d never rest until he sated.  His eyes couldn’t close. 

It was close to 5 AM when he gave up and rolled over, shifting down low enough in the bed to rest his chin against Peter’s ribs.  His chest was bare, but the scratch of Chris’ beard when he nuzzled slow against his skin was too familiar to rouse him on its own.  It took a moment before he shifted in his sleep, moving closer.   The soft content sound that rose from him with his mouth still closed was chased by the soft stroke of Chris' thumb along the tattoo on his arm, tracing the curve of the wolf’s throat.  

When Peter’s eyes opened they were squinted, mostly closed, his voice rough with sleep.  “She’s still asleep; I’d have heard her.  She was just fussy earlier; I think her teeth are still hurting.”

“I know.”  Chris could see him waking up, piece by piece, and he both wanted it, and didn’t.  He loved Peter like this, easy and content, open in a way most of the world never got to see. 

Peter’s hand closed over the back of his neck, kneading with pressure that increased the more his eyes opened.  “Did you have the dream again?” 

“No, baby.”  He hadn’t, but it made his eyes burn that Peter asked—the way he asked, soft and scratchy and ready to wake all the way up if Chris needed him.  He’d never told Peter what the dream was, only that he could never shake it, not without reassuring himself that Peter was safe.  His curiosity about it burned so bright Chris could almost taste it in the back of his throat, but still he never pressed too far; he knew when to let it go, and just kiss him. 

“Can’t sleep so I shouldn’t either?”

“Something like that, yeah.”  Chris loved him so much it was hard to look at him sometimes, his deep blue eyes that could go sharp and hard but fluttered closed when they kissed, the curve of his clever mouth gone soft with affection.  “You’re so beautiful.”

Peter blinked slow, his eyes opening wider, after.  With another breath, he had a little more awareness, a little less heaviness in his thumb when it dragged down the back of Chris’ neck, following his spine. 

“Not that I don’t appreciate the…appreciation, but you’re not usually like this unprovoked unless something’s wrong or you’ve been drinking—and you don’t smell like you’ve been drinking.”

“Is that an unsubtle way of telling me I’m not good enough to you?”

“You know you are, and you know that’s not what I meant.”  Peter’s nails turned sharp, but his touch went light, skimming up to scratch softly through the hair just above the nape of his neck.  It felt so good Chris would have sworn he could feel his spine melting like butter.  “You didn’t wake me up to tell me I’m pretty.  What’s on your mind?  Victoria?”

Chris’ mouth was full with too many answers; enough that his jaw hurt.  It had always been that way, with the two of them, and maybe always would be.  He had spent too many years saving up words, and not enough practice getting them out.

_If things were different, I could have been her._

_If things were different, I could have done what she did._

_Does that scare you?  Did this whole mess scare you?  Do you worry about what I might do, if it happened to me?_

_I almost shot myself when I was 20.  I had the gun in my mouth.  It was so close; I wanted it to be over.  You’re the only reason I didn’t.  You made me want to wait for you.  I wanted you like I’ve never wanted anything, except maybe Allison, now.  I never knew I could want anything this much, but I look at the two of you and I want you both so much it hurts._

Chris hid his face from his own thoughts against Peter’s chest, kissing over his ribs, along onto the softer give of his stomach.  It was good to feel his chest rise and fall with his breath, good to feel the sleepy warmth of his skin, to taste it for a moment on his tongue.  Even the flex of his abs under Chris’ mouth was endearingly sluggish, his cock stirring in a slow rise. 

Peter hummed, his back arching, half hard cock pressing up against Chris’ chest through his boxers.  “I see; it’s like that.  Well, I thought you wanted to talk but I can’t say I’m disappointed—I mean, I need about six more hours of sleep once we’re done, but I’d rather you wake me up when you’re horny than become one of those sad soulmate couples who schedule sex to keep their bond up because they’re too busy to—“

“It’s not like that.”

“I know it’s not, and it’s not going to be if we make an effort—“

“I did want to talk.”  His mouth was too close to the waistband of Peter’s boxers for talking, but he paused there anyway, his breath hot on the curve of his hip.  “We need to talk.”  The open mouthed kiss he pressed to Peter’s skin was slow; he tasted so good.  A little salty with sweat, clean but like himself.  Even his human senses could smell Peter’s arousal growing. 

“One or the other, Christopher; are we going to talk or are you going to suck my cock?  I doubt it’s a conversation we can multitask.” 

“You’d carry on a conversation if someone cut out your tongue; I don’t think there’s much that could stop you.”  It was wry, and easy, like teasing Peter always was.  It was so easy to be drawn into bantering with him, and still it lightened his chest every time, loosening the knots that kept him tense.  When he kissed the spot where he’d sucked at Peter’s skin a moment ago it was almost chaste, with only the brief drag of his beard to make Peter shiver.  “We need to talk.”

Peter’s nails pressed sharper against his scalp, leading him up until they were chest to chest, close enough to kiss though they didn’t, close enough that their breath mingled.  “Alright.  Talk to me.  What has you so wound up?” 

When he had practiced this conversation, he always began with _I want us to keep Allison.  I want us to raise her together._

Looking down at Peter in the dark, sleepy from staying up with her, the notion that not keeping her as their own was even still an option seemed suddenly ludicrous.  In all the time he’d spent waiting, that question had already been decided. 

When he opened his mouth, the rest came out instead.  “When we got married, your mom offered me land.  I didn’t take it, then, but if she’ll offer it again—I think we should build a house.  We should have a place of our own; a home for Allison—and I’m not saying I want to retire, we’re too young for that, but I want to slow down.  She can’t grow up on the road.  That’s no life for a kid.”

Peter moved beneath him, legs shifting to let him fit between them, his hands scratching light down his back, and up again.  His eyes were so bright, rich blue with the faintest hint of a glow in the center, soft gold.  He was so stunning Chris couldn’t breathe. 

“Are you saying you want to start a pack with me?”  Anyone could have heard the teasing, there, but Chris knew him.  Chris could hear the hope. 

“I want everything with you.  I always have.”  There were better ways he could have said it, but in the moment, it didn’t feel misleading.  It didn’t feel wrong, only honest. 

 

_xvi. family; Beacon Hills, California, the Argent-Hale house_

When Cynthia called about the murders in Kentucky, Allison was four.  Younger than he’d ever seen Annie, plenty old enough to be an absolute whirlwind.  On his desk in the office Chris had three framed pictures—one Talia had taken without them knowing of he and Peter in the woods, holding hands and looking at each other in a way they could’ve tried a dozen times to stage and never been able to catch, one of Allison when she’d first started walking, standing under her own power with undeniable triumph in her eyes, and one of artwork done on old computer paper with thick paint and crayon captions—three handprints and a pawprint, labeled _dad, daddy Peter_ , and _me_.  The arrow connecting Peter’s pawprint to his handprint had been painted with a thick brush, terribly drippy.  The P was backwards.  The first time Allison saw it framed on his desk, she’d beamed so wide it looked like her cheeks should have hurt.  

The boy who’d died in a hospital in Lexington last week was only a year older. 

Chris had cared all his life about the lives he saved doing the work he did—enough that Peter had argued in the past he cared more than he should have.  The kid would have gotten to him no matter what, but becoming a father had changed something in him.  It didn’t just hurt to pull up the news and see a stranger’s smiling little boy bundled up in a Star Wars blanket over his obituary, it made him nauseous. 

His name was Brett Cook.  He’d been enjoying kindergarten; he loved Star Wars, especially the droids, and gardening with his mothers.  He was survived by his parents, two older siblings, and a kitten named Threepio his obituary stated that his mothers knew he would have wanted listed.  The picture at the end of the article showed the two of them, the orange tabby on his shoulder like a parrot, both of them looking with rapt attention out a bay window at a bird feeder.

After he’d stared at it until his eyes burned, Chris poured his first glass of whiskey.

According to the news reports, the dog that bit him hadn’t been found, but the cause of death had seemed to be a strange, fast acting infection.  The doctors were stumped; the public was asked to report any sightings of large roaming dogs to the police. 

On the phone, Cynthia’s voice had been thicker with rage than fear.  “It’s him; I know it is.”

Chris knew it, too. 

He laid the map he hadn’t taken out since before Allison was born out on his desk, and over the course of a few hours lost himself in the rhythm of research he hadn’t done in far too long.  He placed X’s over Lexington, Richmond, Mobile, Georgiana, and Rainbow City.  The attacks in Alabama had been spread out over the last two years; the one in Mobile had taken him over an hour to track down, and still he was sure there were stops he’d missed.

Taking in the map as a whole, he had at least 30 X’s, spanning 15 years—a record he was absolutely certain was incomplete, but almost as good as he was likely to get it.  Whoever the alpha was behind it all, he hadn’t gone further west than Texas, or further north than Massachusetts, but he roamed freely and there didn’t seem to be a pattern to the direction.  The pattern to the trauma he left behind, on the other hand, was entirely predictable. 

Chris had just poured himself another whiskey when his office door opened, Peter slipping in and closing it behind him slow so the lock would barely click.  When she was with at least one of them Allison slept like the dead, but in her own bed she was jumpy, startling at every sound if it was close enough to hear. 

Chris tried not to let his mind delve too deeply into that.  Whenever possible, he tried not to think of the farmhouse. 

“It’s almost 3 AM.”  Peter did a decent job of going light on the reproach, but his eyes lingered a bit long on the bottle.  He worried Chris drank too much; he worried about too many things. 

Chris sipped at his third glass, and looked back at the map.  Otter Creek, Jacksonville, Tarpon Springs.  He had been tailing the alpha so close back then it had seemed by the end of the year he’d have him, but something else had always come up, somewhere he knew he could make a difference, rather than just have half a shot at making one.  If he’d stuck to it, he didn’t want to think about how many kids might still be alive.  “Is it?  I had a phone call just after dinner; must have lost track of time.”

“Losing that much time would be enough to make some people suspect a UFO abduction.” 

“You’re not getting rid of me that easy.” 

Peter was barefoot; his steps so soft on the hardwood he was silent.  The familiarity in the way he moved was comforting.  Chris closed his eyes and felt Peter’s scanning over him, and the desk.  Peter’s gaze was comforting, too.  After too long alone in here, away from him, it was nice just to be seen. 

“What is all this?” 

“A real sick fuck.”   Chris opened his eyes to Peter’s fingers skimming over the map—Dyess, Memphis, Franklin.  “Come here.”  He only had to hold out his hand for Peter to take it, and come to him.  The settling of his weight into Chris’ lap made Chris feel lighter than he had since the phone rang.  He snaked his arm around Peter’s waist to hold him close, fingers curling against the strip of bare skin between Chris’ t-shirt and the waist of Peter’s softest pajama pants, old and worn and comfortable.   He slept shirtless almost always; more likely than not, he’d put it on for the scent, to try and help himself fall asleep without his mate in bed.  He wouldn’t have admitted to it, not outright, but he didn’t have to.  Chris knew him. 

After another sip, Chris settled his glass down on the edge of the desk.  He turned to kiss Peter’s arm just at the edge of his sleeve where his skin was warm and soft, even with the strength in his biceps.  Once he’d done it, it was too tempting not to stay like that for a moment and breathe him in, the scent of him that Chris had never quite a name for but _Peter_.  Deep down, if he had to name it, he smelled like home. 

“I missed you.”

“We missed you.  You missed bedtime.”

The sting in the reminder was short, but wicked sharp.  He never wanted to hurt her, not ever, and he couldn’t count the number of times he’d reminded himself that they couldn’t take many jobs, not now, not while she was little and needed them there so desperately.  Bedtime was important; every day was important. 

And still, his responsibility was important, too.  It was ironic, really, that Gerard had thought he needed a brand on his skin to remind him of what he was, and what it meant.  The burden of his name wasn’t something he was ever going to be able to escape, or forget.  He cared too much for the luxury of forgetting. 

“I’ll make it up to her.  I’ve been working; it couldn’t wait.  It’s waited long enough already.” 

“It’s that bad?”  There was, then, even less reproach than there had been when he’d walked in.  For better or worse, getting Peter on the road with him young like he had, he’d gotten a taste for the hunt, too.  For all that she’d come to care for him as a part of the pack, Chris had a strong feeling that though she might have denied it if he asked, Carmen would never forgive him for teaching her boy to scratch the itch of running prey down, tasting blood in his mouth.  The whole family hunted deer, but not the way Peter hunted.  Their eyes didn’t gleam quite the same. 

“Worse,” Chris said.  He settled back into his chair, shifting Peter’s weight closer to him.  Peter reached back toward the desk, and nudged Chris’ glass further away.  “Do you remember when I told you about the little girl I shot in the woods?”

“The one you took home to her mother and helped her learn how to not lose her mind?  Yes, I remember.”  Peter’s lips pressed to his temple, warm and dry.  “Did she call?”

“Her mother.  She’s no hunter, but when I was with her—I got interested in the alpha that had gone after Annie.  It wasn’t normal; they don’t behave like that.  Biting a kid and leaving her to fend for herself without even trying to take her in as pack?  It’s crazy; it’s nonsense.”

“Why go to the trouble of creating a puppy you aren’t going to train?  It’ll just shit in the house and eat your furniture—metaphorically speaking.”

“Metaphorically or literally speaking, it’s bullshit.  No alpha in their right mind wastes their time making betas they don’t intend to keep.  That’s energy running right through your fingers—and drawing attention to yourself to do it.”

The soft noise of understanding from Peter’s throat made him proud.  He hadn’t started young as a hunter, but his instincts were good.  He was smart; he made connections—sometimes, he made them before Chris ever did.  “He’s not in his right mind.”

“No.  But he’s not out of control either.  He’s something else.”  Chris leaned forward, his arm snug around Peter’s waist to keep him in place.  He traced his fingers over the map, following the X’s.  “When I started looking into Annie’s case, I found four other attacks in Georgia within a year of her incident.  A lot of them went under the radar because they just seemed like dog bites—if there’s a pack close enough to take the kids in they’re never in the news again, but where Annie was no one knew about her.  I started to figure out I could track him with that—the kids that didn’t survive the bite, and the ones who did but didn’t find a pack.  God only fucking knows how many I’ve missed that got taken in or disappeared without a trace.” 

Peter’s eyes scanned the map; Chris could feel him counting in the silence.  “Jesus Christ.”  In his voice, Chris could hear both disgust, and a begrudging admiration for the scale.  He didn’t like it, but he wouldn’t have been able to recognize it so well if he it hadn’t crossed his mind, too.  Whoever this alpha was, he’d carried on unchecked for ages, wreaking havoc.  There was something impressive in that.  “You’re not tracking a wolf; this isn’t wolf behavior.  You’re tracking a serial killer; shifting to attack is just his weapon of choice.”

“That’s the closest description I’ve had for him—but he doesn’t want them all dead; I think he likes the roulette.  Some live, some die.  Either way, he’s getting off on it.”  Chris reached, leaning closer to the desk to snag his glass back, and down the last of it.  His hand slipped under Peter’s shirt, pressing solid against his stomach.  He was so warm.  “I want him.  I’ve wanted him dead since I found Annie; it’s past time.  I should have shot the bastard eleven years ago.” 

Peter’s hand dropped to cover his, thumb rubbing over Chris’ knuckles through the thin cotton.  “What stopped you?”

“Honestly?  Impatience—and if I’m honest I think I wasn’t sure I could do it on my own.  I know he’s an alpha, but I don’t know that he’s a loner; I just assumed it.  He could be travelling with a pack; he could be well protected.  He could be a she for all I know; whoever they are, they’re hard to predict. I followed him down to Florida when I left Georgia but I never even caught a glimpse; I was always behind him, and there was always something else coming up that I knew I could fix.” 

“He won’t be any easier to track now.”

“No.  He won’t.” 

“If he does have a pack, even the two of us won’t be enough.”

“I thought about asking Talia to come with us—I could call Silas, and I’ve still got a few contacts back east.  There’s a few who might be crazy enough to get in on it, if we’re really going for it—but I’m not sure we shouldn’t try it alone first.”  The craziest plan, the one he likely wouldn’t have named if he _hadn’t_ been drinking spilled out before he could stop it.  “Whoever this is, they’ve got more power than they deserve.” 

He could feel the moment Peter caught on like a shiver through the bond.  The room itself seemed to get closer around them, the air crisper, somehow.  They were both looking at the splash of red on the inside of Peter’s arm, pressed alongside Chris’ against his waist.  Chris’ heart had to be jackrabbit fast, but Peter didn’t comment.  He wondered then, and later, if it was because his was pounding, too. 

“It’s not how I imagined it—but I never wanted it how I imagined it,” Peter said, so quiet the tick of the clock on the bookshelf was almost louder.  “When Brandon died, the first thing I thought was that I had to get used to it—it was like feeling a vein ripped out of my chest, and I kept thinking, this is going to happen twice more.  Every time mom left the house, when Talia was pregnant with Derek and Laura—“  Peter shook his head, the thickness in his voice gathered so tight Chris could see the pressure in his throat.  The muscles of his neck strained as he swallowed.  They had never spoken about it before that night; not like that.  Of all the times they’d talked about Peter’s family, it had never been how it had felt to grow up knowing that if he was third in the line of succession, over half his immediate family would have to die to facilitate the future already decided for him. 

Chris drew his hand out from beneath his shirt over Peter’s stomach, and linked his hand with Peter’s.  His fingers were smaller, and stronger than Chris’ in squeezing back. 

“It doesn’t have to be like that—I don’t think it’s going to be like that.  Your mom’s healthy; Talia’s young.  I know that’s not a guarantee, and I can’t promise you nothing’ll happen to them, but I can say that I don’t think it will.  I don’t think it happens like that—and if it does, it can happen somewhere else.  If we pull this off, it’ll be different, here.”  Reckless it might have been, but among the vital lessons he’d learned from his trip in Maine, he’d learned that possibilities were infinite.  Realities were infinite.  Somewhere out there, there were thousands of Peters loving him, and thousands more who’d never met him.

He didn’t like to think about those.

“ _If_ we pull this off.  An alpha on their own would be more dangerous than most things we’ve hunted; a deranged psychopath who may or may or may not have a pack with them—“

“I know.”

“It’ll take time; maybe months—and we can’t take Allison.”

“I know.”  The second time, Chris said it heavier.  He’d thought it all through, and he’d come to the same conclusion.  It wasn’t going to be pretty; it’d take breaking their unofficial rules about how much time out of the year they worked.  It’d take leaving their little girl. 

Peter wouldn’t be convinced by the pictures of the little boy, not like Chris had been.  He was far from heartless, and he’d have felt something, but it would have only driven him to get up and go to Allison’s room, to shift and lay sleepless on the end of her bed like he did when she was sick.  Chris knew better than to try to appeal to his better nature—his better nature was strong, but the range was narrow. 

“If we do this—and I think we can, you and me—“  It was an appeal to the nostalgia of their early years, in part, but it was true, too.  They were strong together; they always had been.  “We put a stop to this bastard, and come back home in a better position to protect our family.  Not just how you’ll be coming back, but how it’ll look—when word gets out, we’ll have respect from both sides except for the extremes, and they’ll have it out for us no matter what we do.” 

Peter studied the map, and there was no change in his eyes, no sign.  He didn’t speak a word, and still Chris knew he’d already decided.  He could feel the anticipation in his own gut, a stirring that wasn’t quite fear or want, but both, alive and struggling with itself. 


	7. VII

_xvii. transmutation_

_xvii.i  Cartersville, Georgia; Cartersville High School_

There was surreal incongruency to seeing Annie again with Peter beside him, two pieces of his life from wildly different angles pressed together with Chris caught between them.   He had never imagined they would meet—he had never imagined he’d see her again, but it was clear from the way she ran to him and wrapped her arms around his neck just as eagerly as she had when she was a little thing that she’d thought about him.  If he’d intended to leave quickly enough not to leave a mark he hadn’t managed it, but she grinned up at him with so much clear joy his throat had closed for a moment around the shock.  He’d left a mark, but it wasn’t a bad one. Seeing her as a teenage girl who’d lived to grow into her power and find a pack was proof that he’d done something right.  

“Christopher Robin,” she said, a teasing lilt to it now that was far too fond to be making fun of either of them.  For a moment, she was so happy that the edges of her irises carried a ring of brilliant blue, halo thin.  “You should have told me you were coming.  I’d have skipped chemistry.”

“Your mom said you’d like it if I surprised you.”

“Well, you did.  I could smell you in the hallway—I didn’t think you’d be here until this weekend.”  It was then that her eyes flicked to Peter, casting over him once, then back up when she took in the tattoo.  “Peter?”

Peter nodded to her, his eyes flaring for the briefest moment when he held out his hand to take hers and draw her closer.  The touch lingered too long to be a handshake, but it wasn’t the deliberate scent marking of pack members, either, but rather something in between.  Cordial, familiar contact, the greeting of wolves who considered each other to be an ally.  Chris was a member of the Hale pack beyond all question, but he wouldn’t have imagined just how much Annie would still consider him a little bit hers to claim, distant family. 

It pleased Peter, too; Chris could see it in the slope of his shoulders, the lack of tension.  Even when they were friends, he was almost always different around wolves who weren’t pack when Chris was beside him—as if he had to be ready to defend at any moment, constantly on alert to look after what was his. 

“Peter Hale; it’s a pleasure.  Christopher’s told me about you several times—though in all his stories, you’re much smaller.”

“She was a baby; it wasn’t that long ago.”  Chris couldn’t help but say it.  Even though it made her roll her eyes, there was nothing but fondness in the way Annie looked at him. 

“I graduate in less than two years.”

“You do not.”

“It’s not my fault you’re old; time’s not moving any faster.”  Her grin was bright, hands quick as she fished out her keys.  “I am, though.” 

“God, don’t tell me you’re driving; you’re a baby.”

“I can drive faster than you, old man, even in what I’ve got.”  It wasn’t far, just across the lot under the shade of an elm.  She had an old grey Volvo, an 85, maybe.  It was built like a tank, but the window was missing on the driver’s side.  Annie didn’t seem to mind it, but took advantage with agility only a werewolf could have, hopping over the door and sliding in smooth without opening it.  She made it look easy—somehow, even the way she leaned so far out the window to look back at them that she could have almost reached down to touch the pavement looked easy.  “You want to race?”

“I want you to not get a ticket.”

“Buzzkill.”

“Buckle your seatbelt!”

“I thought Peter might have made you more fun!” 

“You’re overestimating my skills,”  Peter countered, beating him.  His eyes when Chris caught them bright with warmth.  He’d wanted the two of them to get along, for Peter not to be jealous of these people who’d had a piece of him, a long time ago.  “I can only do so much—but _I_ can race you.”

“Peter, _no_ —“  It didn’t matter, and he didn’t put much force into it.  By the time he said it, she was already gone. 

He could feel Peter’s eyes on him, boring in.  It wasn’t uncomfortable, but it had a weight all the same.  Chris accepted it, and stepped closer.  “God, she’s so big.  I’ve talked to her on the phone a few times over the years, but in my head I guess she’s never grown up.  It’s stupid.”

“It’s human.”  Peter nuzzled against his shoulder, casual marking.  She wasn’t competition by any means, but as tight as she’d held on, he had to smell like Annie.  He doubted Peter was even conscious of trying to cover it.  “She loves you.  I could smell it on her.”

“I saved her life.  She was confused; she didn’t have anywhere to turn.”

Peter hummed, the vibration almost a growl where his chest pressed to Chris’ back.  “That would make her grateful; it wouldn’t make her love you.  _You_ did that.”

He had the feeling, then, that Peter was trying to teach him something, or tell him something, but whatever it was, he hadn’t fully let it in.  His mind was on the hunt, and the girl and her mother he’d dared to hold who had never belonged to him, and never would.  Whatever he’d intended for Chris to absorb rolled off his skin and the moment passed.  They pulled out of the parking lot with Peter driving, and didn’t beat Annie home. 

The crow of triumph she called out from the back porch when they pulled up was absolutely nothing like a howl, and even so, the thought resounded with it in Chris’ chest that this must be a hint of what family felt like, to people who had it everywhere—a place that you could go after years away, and know that you were welcome. 

_xvii.ii  Cartersville, Georgia; the Carver house_

For two weeks on the tail end of Georgia’s long summer they stayed in that beautiful little house, with a swing on the back porch, and two cats who hated Peter and loved Annie.  It was much further north than Valdosta and it didn’t remind Chris so much of Florida, but the bugs still sang in the trees, and the house backed onto a field that turned magical with the fireflies at night.  It was late in the season; they should have been dead, but they lingered, little pinpricks flaring over the tall grass. 

Chris could imagine Allison in a place like that one, delight in her eyes as she ran through brush taller than she was.  How she’d squirm when they grabbed her to check for ticks, how she’d giggle when Peter growled.  Werewolves weren’t scary for her; they never had been.  There was nothing safer in the world to her than the two of them, both of them monsters by others’ definitions.  It reminded Chris sometimes of the babies held in a crocodile’s mouth, utterly safe, blissfully unaware of who it was that loved them. 

Like much of the life they now lived had, the land Cynthia had taken over came from the McCormack pack who’d held their piece of country land for generations.  Annie had had the good fortune of meeting one of them on a trip to Atlanta with her mother, and it hadn’t set right with them that such a little thing had been left an omega .  Wolves were paternal; even full wolves in the wild would sometimes raise cubs that weren’t their own.  Cynthia had seen her daughter’s best chance for a stable life and taken it, uprooting herself to let her baby flourish in a pack almost 300 miles from the place where she’d lived her entire life.

The McCormack pack was big and welcoming, and the old plantation style house that was the hub of the pack wasn’t far down the road.  Wolves and humans both were in and out of Cynthia’s little house at all hours, but only Cynthia and Annie called it home.

Cynthia Carver kept her name even when Annie had wanted to change hers.  She remained single, too, still no match to the tile on her thigh.  She didn’t seem to mind it too much more than she had before, but it would have been a lie for Chris to say that he didn’t notice that she looked at him the same way she had then.  She was respectful, more than welcoming to Peter, and she wouldn’t have asked for anything—but she looked, and he could see it, even though he’d thought it best to pretend he didn’t. 

Peter was polite, but at night in the room in the attic she’d let them use he pushed Chris up against the door and bit down on his throat until he bruised and bled.  Chris didn’t mind it, but he had expected it to slow—when it didn’t, when his throat was sore and bruised purple from Peter’s teeth, Chris couldn’t help but try to soothe him, his voice soft. 

“They know I’m yours.  No one’s going to get the wrong idea.” 

Peter’s answer came muffled against the collar of Chris’ shirt, his eyes gleaming in the dark.  “The pack respects a mating bite.  _She_ might not.”

“You know I would never.”  Chris kissed him after he said it, long and slow, fingers curling around the nape of Peter’s neck.  He could feel the beat of his heart where their chests pressed together, steady and strong and familiar.  “You know I love you more than anything.”

“I don’t think you would, now, but you were with her before.  You can’t say you would _never_.”  The knife edge to it was almost enough to make him regret that he’d told Peter about the two of them on the drive out to Georgia.  At the time it had seemed like a good idea, but seeing him riled up over it made Chris wonder if he’d made a mistake—later, with more thought, he’d know he hadn’t.  Peter would have solved it on his own, and that would have been ugly.  Nothing about how he’d treated Cynthia had veered all the way into ugly, only possessive, a little oversensitive. 

Chris nuzzled at the underside of his jaw, mimicking a wolf in the way that he knew always set Peter wanting him.  The taste of his skin was still heady even after years together, the sandpaper rasp of barely-there stubble still enough to send a tingle up his spine.  “It was a long time ago.  I didn’t have you.”

“She still wants you.  I can smell it on her when she looks at you.”

“So?  Let her look; she can’t have me, and she knows it.  _You_ know it.” 

“She still had part of you.  A part that I didn’t.”  It wasn’t as knife sharp, but it was the core that was cutting him; Chris could feel it.  It wasn’t that he feared anything might happen, or rage at her silent appreciation—it was jealousy for a version of Chris he couldn’t touch, but _she_ had.  She couldn’t take what was Peter’s, but he couldn’t reclaim what had been hers, either.  The Chris that she had known was forever out of his reach.  For a man who kept the things he loved most close to his chest, being reminded of moments in time he could never hold had to burn. 

Chris knew that when he took Peter to bed and let himself be thoroughly claimed, knew it when he gave Peter coffee in the morning and Peter kissed him hard before he took it.  He knew the sore points, the bruises too deep to be obvious, and he should have known what Peter wanted from the minute he volunteered to take Chris’ place in walking Annie’s memories with her all the way back to the night she’d been bitten.  It was so long ago, now, she wasn’t likely to be afraid, but he’d planned to go with her, to be the protector at her side she imagined him to be if it would make this task they’d asked of her go a little easier. 

In the moment when Peter talked her alpha into using him instead of Chris, Chris had thought it was chiefly to keep claws out of his neck, and a little for the reasons Peter had given— _he_ would be the one who could track the alpha by scent; he would be the one to take him down, at the end.  Of the two of them, he needed the most information, and he had the most intimate experience with his own kind.  There was a chance he could glean more from her memories than Chris could; it made sense for him to go. 

Chris knelt in front of the two of them, one hand in hers, one hand in Peter’s, and waited while the two of them covered ground he couldn’t see.  He didn’t question why Peter looked a little shaken when he came out, not with where he’d been; he didn’t question why it had taken so long.  At first, he only gave him water, and kissed his forehead, and listened. 

“He’s grey and white, almost like a malamute.  That’s how he gets them close.  They think he’s a dog—by the time they know he isn’t, it’s too late.”  Peter sounded grim enough in relaying it that it was possible seeing that truth could have upset him—but Chris knew him like the back of his hand.  Like the tattoo on their arms, full of curves, and depth.  He hadn’t known it then, but he was always going to find the right order for the pieces that didn’t fit—it was only a matter of time. 

In the moment, still uncertain, he’d wrapped his arms around Peter while Annie hid her face against her mother’s shoulder, tucking Peter’s face against his own though he hadn’t needed to hide.  The claw marks were still bloody on the back of Peter’s neck when he kissed them, the skin not knitting together in the way he’d grown used to.  Even though they’d come from an alpha the holes didn’t last more than two days, but it had felt like an eternity compared to how quickly Peter usually healed.   It had unsettled him so deeply to see blood on Peter’s skin that wouldn’t fade that he’d hardly been able to keep himself from touching it, like his hand on Peter’s neck could make the hurt disappear.  He couldn’t take Peter’s pain, not in any tangible way, but he wasn’t sure it mattered—Peter leaned into him every time as if he could, as if there was magic in his hands. 

_xvii.iii Trion, Georgia; alongside the Chattooga River_

The pieces came together the day before they left Georgia, and it didn’t make Chris half as angry as it probably should have.  The truth had settled in his mind in the morning, but he gave it almost the whole day to fester, roiling in his mind while they searched for cold clues in a town with a grey river under a grey sky.  Annie had wanted to come and he’d almost let her, but at the end of the day, with anger thrumming under his skin like an engine idling, he was glad he hadn’t.  If he was going to confront Peter, it would be better to do it there, out of her earshot.

If he was going to fight with his mate, better to do it where the pack wouldn’t see, or hear, or smell, because even angry, how they appeared to the pack was still something he couldn’t help but consider.  He’d been a werewolf’s mate too long by then to not know that it would have mattered.  You didn’t fight with your mate in front of wolves who weren’t pack, not unless you weren’t stable, not unless the bond was at risk.  A quarrel with Peter was between him and Peter; he wouldn’t have it look like a weakness.

The smell of the river mingled with the scent of the rain, Georgia red clay mud clinging to his boots and splashed high on the body of the Jeep they’d bought new to replace the Range Rover.  The gravel lot they’d parked in was empty, on the edges of a town already sparse.  There would be no one to interrupt them, not as nasty as the weather had been, not with evening fast coming on.  It was a good spot for checking ammo, preparing for the drive that faced them before the end of the week; a good spot for a conversation he didn’t want. 

He didn’t need Peter’s senses for the sound of his shoes on the gravel behind Chris when he approached to sound magnified; it was all he could hear.  He hated being angry at him, and he hated how hard it was to maintain it.  Even then, even with righteous fury, he could feel Peter’s approach like the return of the sun. 

Peter’s footsteps slowed, stopping him out of reach.  The breath he took was deep enough that Chris could hear it, slow and held.  “You haven’t smelled that bitter in a long time,” Peter said, though his voice was still smooth, still easy.  Only Chris would have heard the tension; only Chris could feel it.  It felt wrong, like clothing put on inside out.  The bond shouldn’t feel rough; it shouldn’t hurt to touch it. 

Even so, the anger was more difficult to hold at the sound of his voice.  It was always like that, with Peter—no matter how his rage flared, the minute they were close together it would start twisting out of reach, until he couldn’t touch it, even if he wanted to. 

“It’s the wolfsbane.  I’m making sure we have enough.”

“Right.  That’s why you stank half the afternoon, before you touched it.”  The gravel crunched under his feet, a step closer when he could have backed away.  “You don’t smell like wolfsbane; you’re angry.  Just get it out; if you don’t you’ll wait until we leave and I don’t want to be stuck in the car with you if you’re pissy.”

Chris had been trained to be careful with weapons and ammo, and that lesson from his father had stuck.  It was worthwhile enough to keep when not much else had been, and he’d become even more careful with wolfsbane after Peter, but there was an unpredictability to his temper he’d never fully been able to cap—a dash of his father in him, just enough to make a burr he couldn’t smooth. 

His memory glossed over the actual motion, but Chris could remember the sound of the bullets scattering when he threw the box down, the clink and clatter of it, the sting of cutting his palm on the hinge.  He felt more surprised every time he remembered it than Peter had looked in the moment, watching him snap.    

Peter hadn’t looked surprised at all. 

“You made Annie show you more than when she got bit.  You wanted to see me.”

“Guilty.”  The way Peter said it grated at him, stretched and easy and far too light. 

“You used her.”  His voice shook; his hand when he pointed at Peter didn’t.  “You knew it was dangerous to keep her in there too long, and you did it anyway.”

“We were already using her; we _came_ here to use her—“

“That’s not fair—“

“—so don’t get high and mighty with me when _you_ asked her to do this, and I just asked for a little more time!”

“ _I_ asked her to help find the fucking monster who did this to her; _you_ dredged up her memories for what?  Because you were jealous of what I did with her mother when you were a kid?  God forbid I was halfway happy with someone else for a few months—it’s not enough that I told you; you’ve got to make a fucking kid go back to the most difficult time in her life?”

“She got bitten, Chris; she didn’t die—she’s not as traumatized as you think, and most of the trauma happened before you were there, or after you left.  Other than the night you met, the memories with you in them weren’t even difficult for her to reach.  She didn’t mind—and yes, you’re well aware I’m jealous and I won’t pretend I’m not, but don’t be thick.  It wasn’t all jealousy; you know it wasn’t.  I wanted to see you.  You can’t tell me you don’t understand that.”

“It doesn’t matter; you had no right to ask.”

“I had _every_ right!  You have an entire history you don’t talk about; getting anything out of you is worse than pulling teeth, so if I have a chance to see something for myself, you think I’m not going to take it?  You think _you_ wouldn’t take it?  You went to fucking _fairies_ to see me—“

“That’s different—“

“—and it doesn’t matter; she’s fine!  She’s fine, and she didn’t mind, and if you really wanted me to stop digging—“  Peter swallowed, the movement heavy.  The air was heavy, too; Chris could remember the humid taste of dirt, the weight of rain that had come, and would again.  “—you’d tell me yourself.  You’d let me see.  Once we finish this—“

“No.  Absolutely not.”  He didn’t mean to say it so harsh, but his stomach had dropped fast, and he spit it out with sticking force.  The flare of light in Peter’s eyes was unmistakably hurt, though how he could tell it from the way they flared when he was happy Chris never could have described.  It was down to details too subtle to be defined, maybe, or tied to the bond, the unsettled feeling in his chest that went too deep to be his distress alone. 

“I wouldn’t hurt you.  I’d be careful—“

“It’s not me I’m worried about.  There’s things you don’t want to see; things you shouldn’t see—what you saw from Annie was enough to shake you up and those were good months.  Whether that makes it better or worse for you to hear I don’t know, but that was a _high_ point, and if you can’t take that—“

“I can take it just fine; I don’t need to you to protect me.  There’s nothing you can tell me I haven’t worried about—you might not be talking, but what you haven’t said has told me more than you think.  I know you were a mess—I’d have known that even if I didn’t smell it on you in her memory.” 

“Then you know it, and there’s nothing to talk about.  I mean, Jesus Christ, Peter—“  his voice cracked, and he looked away, down to the cut in his hand, and the blood, and the bullets scattered.  It was easier to crouch and pick them up, to focus on the cold sting of the metal, his blood mingling with the wolfsbane he’d coated them in.  “You don’t know what it was like for me, and I don’t want you to know.  I don’t want Allison to know; I don’t want to think about it.  It’s over.” 

It was over, and it was still happening; it was always happening.  He could never be separate from what he was; he’d never reach a point unchanged by it.  Who he had been and where he’d come from would always be there, the roots too deep and broad to rid himself of them, every part of himself that had come after built on that foundation—even the part that was Peter’s, and always had been. 

Peter crouched in front of him, his fingers nearly on the bullets before Chris pulled back with a soft sound, thick with the same pressure that stung at his eyes. 

“Don’t; I painted them, too.  You shouldn’t touch—“

“It’s okay.”

“No, I need to get this up and wash my hands—“

Peter’s hand pressed to the wolf on his arm, covering its eyes with his palm.  “It’s okay,” Peter said, soft like they hadn’t been screaming at each other a minute ago, softer than he deserved.  Peter’s thumb stroked along the line of the wolf’s belly, and Chris felt himself breathe a little more deeply.  In, and out, matching Peter’s rhythm, even after it started to rain. 

 

_xvii.iv Corbin, Kentucky; Dog Slaughter Falls_

The place where the water ran red with the alpha’s blood was called Dog Slaughter Falls, but they didn’t know that at the time.  The map was in Chris’ back pocket, but they hadn’t looked at it in hours, tracking with Peter’s nose, and Chris’ eyes, weaving through woods that felt old enough to have eyes of their own.

It had been over 3 months since they left Georgia, weeks of searching and interviewing and coming back to hotel rooms that seemed shittier than they had even a year before.  They talked to Allison on the phone, and got cranky with each other on the days that she cried. 

Years later, she would tell Chris that she understood, that the memories of that trip they’d taken that was the longest they ever left her were fuzzy at best.  Chris couldn’t tell if she was lying, but in that case, he was glad for it.  If she was lying, he didn’t want to know.  He didn’t want to think that they had been too selfish, or too selfless.  It could have been either; it could have been both. 

When they tracked their killer down, it was almost the new moon.  After looking for so long it was strange to think it, but Chris had known it was the night before they stepped into the woods.  He could feel it, anticipation in the air like a thundercloud.  At the edge of the woods, he’d dropped into a crouch and draped his arm over Peter’s shoulders, spoke to him with his mouth pressed close to the base of his ear. 

“We can do this.  Don’t worry about it if he bangs me up a little, you’ll get him back.” 

Peter’s lips curled.  Fearless in touching the wild thing that had always been his, Chris smoothed them.  The prickle of his whiskers was stark against the velvet softness of his wrinkled lips, the quick dart of his tongue against Chris’ fingers softer still.    

“You’ll get him, and then you’ll be our alpha.”  It felt right to say it; tasted right on his tongue.  _Their_ alpha, his and Allison’s.  Peter’s pack.   The whine that left the wolf’s throat was all longing.  “That’s right, baby.  My alpha.  You know, I used to think of you like that in my head, as a kid.  My wolf—“  Even saying it could bring it all back, the heat of the night in Florida pressing in around him, the view of his blurry tattoo under the streetlight.  “My alpha.” 

Peter’s eyes flared gold, and he wondered if it was the last time, a last burst of amber fading into soft brown. 

Chris stood and checked his weapons—the Desert Eagle, loaded with the bullets he’d picked up out of the gravel beside the Chattooga river, some bloodied.  Two knives; bolts for his crossbow.  The crossbow itself, slung over his shoulder—and Peter, the strongest force they head, pressed hard against his leg and looking up. 

Chris whistled to him just once, low and quick, almost like a call to a hunting dog.  “Go.  I’ve got your back.” 

The first time Chris tagged him it was through the trees, and with his crossbow.  The second, with the pistol.  The fact that he was running confirmed that he was alone; if he’d had a pack, he would have called to them.  If he’d had a pack, someone might have taken him down before it came to this. 

When he was forced by the wolfsbane pumping in his blood to shift down to his beta form and continue half-human, Peter’s howl was chilling, like the bay of a hound on the trail of bloodied prey. 

He took to the water to shake Peter off his scent, but it didn’t work, and they weren’t deterred.  With the trees opened up around them, Chris had hit him again, seen his body jerk with the hit of the bolt before he staggered, and kept going.  He didn’t turn to fight until the falls, until his legs were tired and Peter had already circled right, ready to follow him back into the woods. 

For tired prey, he turned on Chris lightning fast, but Chris was never unprepared; he’d fought too long for that.  He met the monster whose name he’d never know with a knife in his hand, unsurprised when the first slash of claws ripped through the strap holding his crossbow and through the front of his shirt.  He gave ground to gain stability, felt his knife glance along the alpha’s jaw and heard the clink of his teeth.  With his other knife too hard to reach, he whipped another crossbow bolt free instead, jamming it home through his forearm and into his side with the force of his own strength mingled with the press of the alpha’s weight as he lunged, off balance, leaning into the pain. 

The rake of his free hand against Chris’ thigh barely registered; he was too intent, his mind too focused as they grappled. 

The end didn’t happen in slow motion; there was no sudden clarity.  Chris was soaking wet; the water was ice cold and flowing hard.  The stone felt slippery under his hands, and his knee was throbbing where it had hit hard in their struggle.  Still, his grip was solid, his fingers so tight in the alpha’s hair he could feel it tearing in his grip as he struggled, blood welling out and running down around the crossbow bolt still held.  He was prepared at any minute to be thrown clear; prepared to fight it until he couldn’t hold on.

There was no magic in bringing the alpha to ground, but there was a flash of it when he looked up and saw Peter. 

He was magnificent in the dark, the red-brown of him so washed out by the lack of moonlight that he could have almost been black like his mother.  It was his eyes that Chris could see the clearest, bright gold, locking onto his  Chris’ answering nod was _now_ or _yes_ or _we’re ready for this; you’re ready for this_.  It was any of it, or all of it, but it was beyond all doubt an understanding that passed between them, and though he’d planned to call Peter forward, he didn’t need to.  All he had to do was hold on. 

Peter knocked into them both like a freight train, his snarl wicked and resounding.  Even in the rush of his charge, Chris was on his mind—one paw hooked tight over Chris’ leg, holding him strong and close to keep him from sliding too close to the edge.  His teeth closed around the alpha’s chin, first, because he wouldn’t show his throat, but it didn’t matter.  Chris heard his jaw crack as it broke, and then it was gone, and he was gurgling, and the water was running dark. 

Chris didn’t let go of him until he was still, and quiet, and there was only the flow of the water, and heavy panting from Peter that was almost as shaky as the way his paw trembled against Chris’ calf. 

Chris’ fingers cramped and ached; his hands felt useless.  He didn’t try to use them, but wrapped his arms around Peter’s neck without finesse, his face buried in the fur at his neck.  It was wet with blood and the river; the smell of him was musty and metallic, almost overpowering, and still Chris pressed close, and breathed him in. 

“It’s okay.  It’s okay, Peter; I’ve got you.  I’ve got you.”  They’d talked about this, planned for it, but in the moment he said nothing important.  It was all mindless comfort, soft and steady, his breath heavy with pain and cold as Peter shook against him until it felt so strong his bones should have rattled with the force. 

When he shifted back he was in Chris’ arms, still, and it was strange all things considered that the first time he saw Peter’s red eyes, they were human.  They were bright in the dark, strawberry red and beautiful, far too familiar even then for Chris to feel afraid.  He’d been looking into some form of those eyes all his life, and finding comfort there. 

A shiver went through him that wasn’t the cold, and he tipped his chin up like Peter had taught him, showing his throat.  “Alpha,”  he whispered, but it didn’t need to carry.  It was only for Peter, and he answered with a growl. 

There was no fear in him then, either.  When Peter’s mouth closed over the bond mark on Chris’ neck, it was with surprising tenderness, his fangs barely pressing against scar tissue, his tongue soft.  He didn’t even break the skin.  The same care was in his hands when he lifted Chris up to hold him, though there was strength there he’d never had—like it took no effort at all; like Chris was weightless. 

It should have been precarious, held like that at such a height, slick rocks underneath them and water flowing around Peter’s feet.  He should have felt on the verge of falling, but Peter’s grip hadn’t wavered.  It should have felt like danger, but in all his life, he’d never felt safer. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter gave me /so much trouble/, which was really unexpected- partially because I originally didn't plan to touch on Chris noticing what Peter did with Annie's memories, but then when I was writing I realized it was critical enough to be included..I promise the rhyme and reason for what moments this series covers will make sense, eventually, lol 
> 
> It was also just difficult in the way that some bits of writing sometimes are, so I'm proud of myself for keeping at it. I think it turned out better than it would have if I'd tried to force this chapter out too soon, which I almost did a few times. I'm glad I resisted the urge, and I hope you guys love this one ^^


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